HOMOEOPATHY, 



AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS; 



TWO LECTURES 



) DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTON SOCIETY FOR THE 
5 DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE. 



BT 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, M. D. 



Karrvov ox tag ovao. 



BOSTON: ^^^Hil 
WILLIAM D. TICKNOR, 

M D CCC XLII. 



Printed by I. B. Butts, 
2 School Street^ Boston. 







PREFACE. 



When a physician attempts to convince a person who 
has fallen into the Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness 
of its pretensions, he is often answered by a statement of 
cases in which its practitioners are thought to have effected 
wonderful cures. ^ main object of the first of these 
Lectures, is to show by abundant facts, that such state- 
ments, made by persons unacquainted with the fluctuations 
of disease and the fallacies of observation, are to be con- 
sidered in general as of little or no value in establishing the 
truth of a medical doctrine, or the utility of a method of 
practice. 

Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering 
from a tedious complaint, that he '* had better try Homoeo- 
pathy," are apt to enforce their suggestion by adding, that 
"at any rate it can do no harm." This may or may not 
be true as regards the individual. But it always does very 
great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error 



IV PREFACE. 

or deception, in a profession that deals with the life and 
health of our fellow-creatures. Whether or not those who 
countenance Homoeopathy are guilty of this injustice to- 
wards others, the second of these Lectures may afford them 
some rneans of determining. 

To deny that good efiects may happen from the observ- 
anfce of diet and regimen when prescribed by Homoeopa- 
thists as well as by others, would be very unfair to them. 
But to suppose that men with minds so constituted as to 
accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make 
up the so-called science of Homoeopathy, are more compe- 
fent than others to regulate the circumstances which inlBlu- 
ence the human body in health and disease, would be 
judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary prac- 
tifioriers. 

To den'y that some patients may have b6en actually 
benefited through the influence exerted upon their imagina- 
tions, would be to refuse to Homoeopathy what all are 
willing to concede to every one of those numerous modes 
of practice known to all intelligent persons by an oppro- 
brious title. So long as the body is affected through the 
mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dis- 
honest character, can fail of producing occasional good to 
those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The 
argument founded on this occasional good, would be as ap- 
plicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circula- 
tion to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar 
had often relieved a poor man's necessities. 



PREFACE. V 

Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period 
when the growing spirit of eclecticism has prepared many 
ingenious and honest minds to listen to all new doctrines 
with a candor liable to degenerate into weakness. It is 
not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and 
mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms, may 
have enticed a few over-refining philosophers, who have 
slid into a vague belief tbart matter subdivided grows less 
material, and approaches nearer to a spiritual nature as it 
requires a more powerful microscope for its detection.- 

However this may be, some persons seem disposed to 
take the ground of Menzel, that the Laity must pass formal 
judgment between the Physician and the Homceopathist, 
as it once did between Luther and the Romanists. The 
practitioner and the scholar must not therefore smile at 
the amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures 
upon this shadowy system ; which, in the calm and serious 
judgment of many of the wisest members of the medical 
profession, is not entitled by any thing it has ever said or 
done to the notoriety of a public rebu^ke, still les^ ky the 
honors of critical martyrdom. 



EaRATA. 

Page 3d, 5th line, /or Smithens, read Smitheus. 
" 4th, line 29th, /or man, read surgeon. 
" 7th, line 27th, /ar other, read two former. 



LECTURES. 



LECTURES. 



Astrology and Alchemy, which came under our notice on 
a former occasion, were seen to be marked by many common 
characters, which, if embraced in a single sentence, may 
stand as a general formula for the whole tribe of the pseudo- 
sciences. 

A theory was gratuitously assumed ; ^^ facts^' were brought 
forward to sustain it, numerous, seemingly well authenticated, 
but untrue, or misapplied ; the phenomena of nature were 
misinterpreted ; the constant failures of honest experimenters 
or observers, were accounted for by a self adjusting system of 
subterfuges ; both falsified the history of the past to gain the 
credit of antiquity; both violated the rules of common sense 
to involve their doctrines in impressive mystery ; and yet 
volumes, alike unnumbered and unmeaning, were written 
upon both subjects, men of learning accepted their preten- 
sions, shrewder, if not wiser rogues employed their artifices 
for a livelihood, and their coffers ran over w^iththe rich man's 
gold and the poor man's silver; because they both held out 
such glittering objects, that the weakness of human nature 
yearned to believe them true. 

I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three 
of which I shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They 
are 

1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula. 

2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the 
Sympathetic Powder. 

3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley. 

4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism. 

1 



The two first illustt'ate the ease with which nximevon^ facts 
are accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless ex- 
travagances. 

The third, exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wis- 
dom, immaculate honesty^ and vast general acquirements to 
tnake a good physician of a great bishop, 

The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct 
delusion, which flourished only forty years ago ; drawn in all 
its details, as being a rich and comparatively recent ill ustra^ 
tion of the pretensions, the arguments, the patronage, by 
means of which, windy errors have long been^ and will long 
continue to be swollen into transient consequence, f All dis^ 
play in superfluous abundance, the boundless credulity and ex- 
citability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine. 



From the time of Edward the Conqueror to Queen Anne^ 
the monarchs of England were in the habit of touching those 
who were brought to them suifering with the scrofula, for the 
cure of that distemper. William the Third had good sense 
enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne resumed it, and 
among her other patients, performed the royal operation upon 
a child, who, in spite of his disease^ grew up at last into Sam^ 
uel Johnson. After laying his hand upon the sufferers, it was 
customary for the monarch to hang a gold piece around the 
neck of each patient. Very strict precautions were adopted to 
prevent those who thought more of the golden angel hung 
round the neck by a white riband, than of relief for their 
bodily infirmities, from making too many calls, as they some- 
times attempted. ^^ According to the statement of the advo- 
cates and contemporaries of this remedy, none ever failed of 
receiving benefit unless their little faith and credulity starved 
their merits. Some are said to have been cured immediately 
on the very touch, others did not so easily get rid of their 
swellings, until they were touched a second time. Several 
cases are related, of persons who had been blind for several 
weeks, and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall^ 
yet recovered their sight immediately upon being touched^ 
so as to walk away without any guide. "^ 

So widely, at one period, was the belief diffused, that in 
the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred thousand per- 
sons were touched by Charles the Second. Catholic divines, 
in disputes upon the orthodoxy of their church, did not deny 

♦Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. IIL p^ 103* 



that the power had descended to protestant princes ; — Dr. 
Harpsfield, in his Ecclesiastical History of England admitted 
it, and in Wiseman's words, '^ when Bishop Tookcr would 
make use of this argument to prove the truth of our church, 
Smithens doth not thereupon go about to deny the matter of 
fact; nay, both he and Cope acknowledge it.'^ *' I myself," 
says Wiseman, the best English surgical writer of his day, — 
** I myself have been a frequent w itness of many hundreds of 
cures performed by his majesty's touch alone, without any as- 
sistance of chirurgery ; and those many of them such as had 
tired out the endeavors of able chirurgeons before they came 
hither. It were endless to recite what I myself have seen, 
and what I have received acknowledgments of by letter, not 
only from the several parts of this nation, but also from Ire« 
land, Scotland, Jersey and Guernsey, It is needless also to 
remember what miracles of this nature were performed by 
the very blood of his late Majesty of blessed memory, after 
whose decollation by the inhuman barbarity of the regicides, 
the relics of that were gathered on chips and in handkerchiefs 
by the pious devotes, who could not but think so great a suf- 
fering in so honorable and pious a cause, would be attended 
by a more than ordinary assistance of God, and some more 
than ordinary miracle : nor did their faith deceive them in 
that point, there being so many hundred that found the ben^ 
efit of it." 

Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted 
for these cures in three ways ; by the journey and change 
of air the patients obtained in coming to London ; by the in^ 
fluence of imao^ination : and the wearino- of gold. 

To these objections he answers, 1st, that many of those 
cured were inhabitants of the city. 2d, that the subjects of 
treatment w^ere frequently infants. 3d, that sometimes sil- 
ver was given, and sometimes nothing, yet the patients were 
cured. 

A superstition resembling this probably exists at the pres- 
ent time in some ignorant districts of England and this 
country. A writer in a Medical Journal in the year 1807, 
speaks of a farmer in Devonshire, who being a ninth son of 
a ninth son, is thought endowed with healing powers like 
those of ancient royalty, — and who is accustomed one day 
in every week, to strike for the evil. 

I remember one of my schoolmates telling me, w^hen a 
boy, of a seventh son of a seventh son, somewhere in Essex 
county, who touched for the scrofula, and who used to hang 



a silver fourpence halfpenny about the neck of those who 
came to him, which fourpence halfpenny it was solemnly 
affirmed became of a remarkably black color after having 
been sometime worn, and that his own brother had been 
subjected to this extraordinary treatment ; but I must add 
that my schoolmate drew a bow of remarkable length, strength 
and toughness for his tender years. 



One of the most curious examples of the fallacy of popu- 
lar belief and the uncertainty of asserted facts in medical 
experience, is to be found in the history of the Unguentum 
Armarium, or Weapon Ointment. 

Fabricius Hildanus, whose name is familiar to every sur- 
gical scholar, aiid Lord Bacon, who frequently dipped a lit- 
tle into medicine, are my principal authorities for the few 
circumstances I shall mentian regarding it. The Weapon 
Ointment was a preparation used far the healing of wounds, 
but instead of its being applied to them, the injured part was 
washed and bandaged, and the weapon with which the wound 
was inflicted, was carefully anointed with the unguent. Em- 
pirics, ignorant barbers, and men of that sort, are said to 
have especially employed it. Still there were not wanting 
some among the more respectable members of the medical 
profession, who supported its claims. The composition of 
this ointment was complicated, in the different formulas giv- 
en by different authorities ; but some substances addressed to 
the imagination, rather than the wound or weapon, entered 
into all. Such were portions of mummy, of human blood, 
and of moss from the skull of a thief hung in chains. 

Hildanus was a wise and learned man, perhaps the 
most so of his time. He was fully aware that a part of 
the real secret of the Unguentum Armarium consisted 
in the washing and bandaging the wound and then letting 
it alone. But he could not resist the solemn assertions 
respecting its efficacy ; he gave way before the outcry of 
facts, and therefore instead of denying all their pretensions, 
he admitted and tried to account for them upon supernatural 
grounds. As the virtue of such applications, he says, as are 
made to the weapon cannot reach the wound, and as it can 
produce no effect without contact, it follows, of necessity, 
that the devil must have a hand in it ; and as he is by far 
the most long-headed and experienced of practitioners, he 
cannot find this a matter of any great difficulty. ^ Hilda-, 
nus himself reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had 



5 

received a moderate wound, for which the Unguentum Ar- 
marium was employed without the slightest use. Yet in- 
stead of receiving this flat case of failure as any evidence 
ao-ainst the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding by 
the devout character of the lady, and her freedom from that 
superstitious and over-imaginative tendency which the devil 
requires in those who are to be benefited by his devices. 

Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his 
Natural History, as having in its favor the testimony of 
men of credit, though, in his own language, he himself 
*^ as yet is not fully inclined to believe it." His remarks 
upon the asserted facts respecting it, shew a mixture of 
wise suspicion and partial belief He does not like the 
precise directions given as to the circumstances under 
which the animals from which some of the materials were 
obtained, were to be killed ; for he thought it looked like 
a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying 
the fault to the omission of some of these circumstances. 
But he likes well that '^ they do not observe the confecting of 
the Ointment under any certain constellation ; which is com- 
monly the excuse of magical medicines, when they fail, that 
they were not made under a fit figure of heaven."* It was 
pretended that if the offending weapon could not be had, it 
would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made like 
it. '' This," says Bacon, '^ I should doubt to be a device to 
keep this strange form of cure in request and use ; because 
many times you cannot come by the weapon itself" And 
in closing his remarks on the statements of the advocates of 
the ointment, he says, *^ Lastly, it will cure a beast as well as a 
man, which I like best of all the rest, because it subjecteth 
the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering, that 
more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fan- 
tastic remedy was asserted to possess wonderful power, and 
when sensible persons ascribed its pretended influence to 
imagination, it was boldly answered that the cure took place 
even when the wounded party did not know of the applica- 
tion made to the weapon, even when a brute animal was the 
subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, lie as we 
all know it was, came in such a shape as to shake the incre- 
dulity of the keenest thinker of his time. The very same 

* This was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hil- 
danus are both very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required 
for different stages of the process. 

1* 



6 

assertion has been since repeated in favor of Perkinism, and 
since that of Homoeopathy. 

The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment 
reproduced itself in the still more famous Sympathetic Pow- 
der. This Powder was said to have the faculty, if applied to 
the blood-stained garments of a wounded person, to cure his 
injuries, even though he were at a great distance at the time. 
A friar returning from the East, brought the recipe to Eu- 
rope somewhat before the middle of the 17th century. The 
grand duke of Florence, in which city the friar was resid- 
ing, heard of his cures, and tried, but without success, to 
obtain his secret. Sir Kenelm Digby, an Englishman well 
known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor, 
which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart 
to his benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Pow- 
der. This English knight was at different periods of his 
life, an admiral, a theologian, a critic, a metaphysician, a 
politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As it is not unfre- 
quent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire 
at the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner 
got home to England than he began to spread the confla- 
gration. 

'' An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of 
the famous Powder. Mr. J. Howel, having been wounded 
in endeavoring to part two of his friends who were fighting 
a duel, submitted himself to a trial of the Sympathetic Pow^- 
der. Four days after he received his wounds. Sir Kenelm 
dipped one of Mr. Howel's garters in a solution of the Pow^- 
der, and immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were very 
painful, grew easy, although the patient, who was conversing 
in a corner of the chamber, had not the least idea of what 
was doing with his garter. He then returned home, leaving 
his garter in the hands of Sir Kenelm, who had hung it up 
to dry, when Mr. Howel sent his servant in a great hurry to 
tell him that his wounds were paining him horribly ; the gar- 
ter was therefore replaced in the solution of the Powder, and 
the patient got well after five or six days of its continued im- 
mersion." 

'' King James First, his son Charles the First, the Duke cf 
Buckingham, then prime minister, and all the principal per- 
sonages of the time were cognizant of this fact: and James 
himself being curious to know the secret of this remedy, 
asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to him, and his 



majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of its 
efficacy, which all succeeded in a surprising manner." * 

The king's physician, Dr. Mayenne, was made master of 
the secret, which he carried to France and communicated to 
the Duke of Mayerne, who performed many cures by means 
of it, and taught it to his surgeon, who, after the duke's 
death, sold it to many distinguished persons, by whose agency 
it soon ceased to be a secret. What was this wonderful sub- 
stance that so astonished kings, princes, dukes, knights, and 
doctors? Nothing but powdered blue vitriol. But it was 
made to undergo several processes that conferred on it ex- 
traordinary virtues. Twice or thrice it was to be dissolved, 
filtered and crystallized. The crystals were to be laid 
in the sun during the months of June, July and August, 
taking care to turn them carefully that all should be exposed. 
Then they were to be powdered, triturated, and again ex- 
posed to the sun, again reduced to a very fine pow^der, and 
secured in a vessel while hot from the sunshine. If there 
seems any thing remarkable in the fact of such astonishing 
properties being developed by this process, it must be from 
our short-sightedness, for common salt and charcoal devel- 
cpe po^^'ers quite as marvellous after a certain number of 
thumps, stirs and shakes, from the hands of modern workers 
of miracles. In fact the Unguentum Armarium and Sympa- 
thetic Powder resemble some more recent prescriptions ; 
the latter consisting in an infinite dilution of the common 
dose in which remedies are given, and the other in an infi- 
nite dilution of the common distance at which they are 
applied. 

Whether philosophers, and more especially metaphysicians, 
have any peculiar tendency to dabble in drugs and dose 
themselves with physic, is a question that might suggest it- 
self to the reader of their biographies. 

When Bishop Berkeley visited the illustrious Malebranche 
at Paris, he found him in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin 
a medicine for an inflammation of the lungs from which he 
was suffering ; and the disease being unfortunately aggra- 
vated by the vehemence of their discussion, or the contents 
of the pipkin, carried him oflf in the course of a few days. 
Berkeley himself aff*orded a remarkable illustration of a truth 

* Diet, des Sciences Medicales. 



8 

which has long been known to the members of one of the 
learned professions, namely, that no amount of talent or of 
acquirements in other departments, can rescue from lament- 
able folly those who, without something of the requisite pre- 
paration, undertake to experiment with nostrums upon them- 
selves and their neighbors. The exalted character of Berke- 
ley is thus drawn by Sir James Mackintosh : ** Ancient learn- 
ing, exact science, polished society, modern literature, and 
the fine arts, contributed to adorn and enrich the mind of 
this accomplished man. All his contemporaries agreed with 
the satirist in ascribing 

« To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.' 

'^ Even the discerning, fastidious and turbulent Atterbury 
said, after an interview with him, * So much understanding, 
so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, 
I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I 
saw this gentleman.' '^ 

But among the writings of this great and good man is an 
Essay of the most curious character, illustrating his weak- 
ness upon the point in question, and entitled, ^' Siris, a Chain 
of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the vir- 
tues of Tar Water, and divers other Subjects,-' — an essay 
which begins with a recipe for his favorite fluid, and slides 
by gentle gradations into an examination of the sublimest 
doctrines of Plato. To shew how far a man of honesty and 
benevolence, and w^ith a mind of singular acuteness and 
depth, may be run away with by a favorite notion on a sub- 
ject his habits and education do not fit him to investigate, I 
shall give a short account of this Essay, merely stating that 
as all the supposed virtues of Tar Water, made public in suc- 
cessive editions of his treatise by so illustrious an author, 
have not saved it from neglect and disgrace, it may be fairly 
assumed that they were mainly imaginary. 

The bishop, as is usual in such cases, speaks of himself 
as indispensably obliged by the duty he owes to mankind, to 
make his experience public. Now, this was by no means 
evident, nor does it follow in general that because a man has 
formed a favorable opinion of a person or a thing he has not 
the proper means of thoroughly understanding, he shall be 
bound to print it and thus give currency to his impressions, 
which may be erroneous and therefore injurious. He would 
have done much better to have laid his impressions before 



some experienced physicians and surgeons, such as Dr. 
Mead and Mr. Cheselden, to have asked them to try his ex- 
periment over again, and have been guided by their answers. 
But the good bishop got excited ; he pleased himself with 
the thought that he had discovered a great panacea ; and hav- 
ing once tasted the bewitching cup of self-quackery, like 
many before and since his time, he was so infatuated with 
the draught, that he would insist on pouring it down the 
throats of his neighbors and all mankind. The precious fluid 
w^as made by stirring a gallon of water with a quart of tar, 
leaving it forty-eight hours, and pouring off the clear water. 
Such was the specific which the great metaphysician re- 
commended for averting and curing all manner of diseases. 
It was, if he might be believed, a preventive of the small 
pox, and of great use in the course of the disease. It was 
a cure for impurities of the blood, coughs, pleurisy, peripneu- 
mony, erysipelas, asthma, indigestion, cachexia, hysterics, 
dropsy, mortification, scurvy, and hypochondria. It was of 
great use in gout and fevers, and was an excellent pre- 
servative of the teeth and gums; answered all the purpose of 
Elixir Proprietatis, Stoughton's drops, diet drinks, and min- 
eral waters; was particularly to be recommended to sea-far- 
ing persons, ladies, and men of studious and sedentary lives; 
could never be taken too long, but, on the contrary, pro- 
duced advantages which sometimes did not begin to show 
themselves for two or three months. 

'^ From my representing Tar Water as good for so many 
things," says Berkeley, " some perhaps may conclude it is 
good for nothing. But charity obligeth me to say what I 
know, and what I think, howsoever it may be taken. Men 
may censure and object as they please, but I appeal to time 
and experiment. Effects misim^puted, c^ses wrong told, cir- 
cumstances overlooked, perhaps, too, prejudices and partiali- 
ties against truth, may for a time prevail and keep her at the 
bottom of her well, from whence nevertheless she emergeth 
sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of all who do not keep 
them shut." I cannot resist the temptation of illustrating 
the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy, 
by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. " The 
hardness of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensi- 
ble of a thousand things that fret and gall those delicate 
people, who, as if their skin was peeled cff, feel to the quick 
every thing that touches them. The tender nerves and low 
spirits of such poor creatures, would be much relieved by 



10 

the use of Tar Water, which might prolong and cheer their 
lives/' *' It [the Tar Water] may be made stronger for brute 
beasts, as horses, in whose disorders I have found it very 
useful.*' '^ This same water will also give charitable relief 
to the ladies, who often want it more than the parish poor ; 
being many of them never able to make a good meal, and 
sitting pale, puny and forbidden, like ghosts, at their own ta- 
ble, victims of vapors and indigestion." It does not appear 
among the virtues of Tar Water that '^ children cried for it," 
as for some of our modern remedies, but the bishop says, *^ I 
have known children take it for above six months together 
with great benefit and without any inconvenience ; and after 
long and repeated experience I do esteem it a most excellent 
diet drink, fitted to all seasons and ages." After mentioning 
its usefulness in febrile complaints, he says : ^' I have had all 
this confirmed by my own experience in the late sickly sea- 
son of the year one thousand seven hundred and forty-one, 
having had twenty-five fevers in my own family cured by this 
medicinal water, drunk copiously." And to finish these ex- 
tracts with a most important suggestion for the improvement 
of the British nation — ^' It is much to be lamented that our 
Insulars, who act and think so much for themselves, should 
yet, from grossness of air and diet, grow stupid or doat sooner 
than other people, who, by virtue of elastic air, water-drink- 
ing, and light food, preserve their faculties to extreme old 
age ; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not 
equalled, even in these regions, by Tar W^ater, temperance, 
and early hours." 
r Berkeley died at the age of about seventy ; he might have 
lived longer, biit his fatal illness was so sudden that there 
was not time enough to stir up a quart of the panacea. He 
was an illustrious man, but he held two very odd opinions; 
that tar water was every thing, and that the whole material 
universe was nothing. 

Most of those present have at some time in their lives heard 
mention made of the Metallic Tractors, invented by one 
Dr. Perkins, an American, and formerly enjoying great repute 
for the cure of various diseases. Many have seen or heard 
of a satirical poem written by one of our ow^n countrymen 
also, about forty years since, and called '* Terrible Tractora- 
tion." The Metallic Tractors are now so utterly abandoned,^ 
that I have only by good fortune fallen upon a single one of 
a pair, to show for the sake of illustration. For moy-e thari 



11 

thirty years this great discovery, which was to banish at least 
half the evils which afflict humanity, has been sleeping un- 
disturbed in the grave of oblivion. Not a voice has, for this 
long period, been raised in its favor ; its noble and learned 
patrons, its public institutions, its eloquent advocates, its bril- 
liant promises are all covered with the dust of silent neglect, 
and of the generation that has sprung up since the period 
when it flourished, very fev/ know anything of its history, 
and hardly even the title which in its palmy days it bore, of 
Perkixism. Taking it as settled, then, as no one appears to 
answer for it, that Perkinism is entirely dead and gone, that 
both in public and private, officially and individually, its for- 
mer adherents even, allow it to be absolutely defunct, I select 
it for anatomical examination. If this pretended discovery 
was made public ; if it was long kept before the public ; if it 
was addressed to the people of dilferent countries ; if it was 
formally investigated by scientific men, and systematically 
adopted by benevolent persons, who did everything in their 
power to diffuse the knowledge and practice of it ; if various 
collateral motives, as interest and vanity were embarked in 
its cause ; if, notwithstanding all these things, it gradually 
sickened and died ; then the conclusion seems a fair one, 
that it did not deserve to live. Contrasting its failure with 
its high pretensions, it is fair to call it an imposition ; wheth- 
er an express fraudulent contrivance or not, some might be 
ready to question. Every thing historically shown to have 
happened concerning the mode of promulgation, the wide 
diffusion, the apparent success of this delusion, the respecta- 
bility and enthusiasm of its advocates, is of great interest in 
showing to what extent and by what means a considerable 
part of the community may be led into the belief of that which 
is to be eventually considered as an idle folly. If there is 
any existing folly, fraudulent or innocent in its origin, which 
appeals to certain arguments for its support ; provided that 
the very same arguments can be shown to have been used for 
Perkinism with as good reason, they will at once fall to the 
ground. Still more, if it shall appear that the general course 
of any existing delusion bears a strong resemblance to that 
of Perkinism, that the former is most frequently advocated 
by the same class of persons who were conspicuous in behalf 
of the latter, and treated with contempt or opposed by the 
same kind of persons who thus treated Perkinism ; if the 
facts in favor of both have a similar aspect ; if the motives of 



12 

their originators and propagators may be presumed to have been 
similar ; then there is every reason to suppose that the existing 
folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after display- 
ing a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiv- 
ing and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit 
that has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeed- 
ed by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the 
same excitable portion of the community. 

Dr. Elisha Perkins was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in 
the year 1740. He had practised his profession with a good 
local reputation for many years, when he fell upon a course 
of experiments, as it is related, which led to his great disco- 
very. He conceived the idea that metallic substances might 
have the effect of removing diseases, if applied in a certain 
manner ; a notion probably suggested by the then recent ex- 
periments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions were 
found to be produced by the contact of two metals with the liv- 
ing fibre. It was in 1796 that his discovery was promulga- 
ted in the shape o^ the 3IetaIIic Tractors, two pieces of metal, 
one apparently iron and the other brass, about three inches 
long, blunt at one end and pointed at the other. These in- 
struments were applied for the cureof different complaints, as 
rheumatism, local pains, inflammations and even tumors, by 
drawing them over the affected part very lightly for about 
twenty minutes. Dr. Perkins took out a patent for his dis- 
covery, and travelled about the country to diffuse the new 
practice. He soon found numerous advocates of his disco- 
very, many of them of high standing and influence. In the 
year 1798, the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were 
publicly employed in the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen. 
About the same time the son of the inventor, Mr. Benjamin 
Douglass Perkins, carried them to London, where they soon 
attracted attention. The Danish physicians published an 
account of their cases, containing numerous instances of 
alleged success, in a respectable octavo volume. In the year 
1804, an establishment honored with the name of thePerkin- 
ean Institution, was founded in London. The transactions 
of this institution were published in pamphlets, the Perkine- 
an society had public dinners at the Crown and Anchor, and 
a poet celebrated their medical triumph in strains like these ; 

" See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease 
The ruthless rage of merciless disease, 
O'er the frail part a subtile fluid pour, 



13 

Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower, 
Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego, 
And leap exulting like the bounding roe ! " 

While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Doug- 
lass Perkins was cahuly pocketing money, so that after some 
half a dozen years, he left the country with more than ten 
thousand pounds, which had been paid him by the believers 
in Great Britain. But in spite of all this success, and the 
number of those interested and committed in its behalf, Per- 
kinism soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are 
spoken of by an intelligent writer as being almost forgotten. 
Such was the origin and duration of this doctrine and prac- 
tice, into the history of which we will now look a little more 
narrowly. 

Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was estab- 
lished and kept up ; whether it was principally by those who 
were accustomed to medical pursuits, or those whose habits 
and modes of reasoning were different ; whether it was with 
the approbation of those learned bodies usually supposed to 
take an interest in scientific discoveries, or only of individu- 
als whose claims to distinction were founded upon their po- 
sition in society, or political station, or literary eminence; 
whether the judicious or excitable classes gave most deeply 
into it ; whether, in short, the scientific men of that time 
were deceived, or only intruded upon, and shouted down for 
the moment by persons who had no particular call to invade 
their precincts. 

Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Pro- 
fession in the way of encouragement. One Dr. Fuller, who 
wrote in England, himself a Perkinist, thus expressed his opin- 
ion ; ^'It must be an ertraor dinar y exertion of virtue and 
humanity for a medical man, whose livelihood depends either 
on the sale of drugs, or on receiving a guinea for writing a 
prescription, which must relate to those drugs, to say to his 
patient * You had better purchase a set of Tractors to keep 
in your family ; they will cure you without the expense of 
my attendance, or the danger of the common medical prac- 
tice.' For very obvious reasons medical men must never 
be expected to recommend the use of Perkinism. The Trac- 
tors must trust for their patronage to the enlightened and 
philanthropic out of the profession, or to medical men retired 
from practice, and who know of no other interest than the 
luxury of relieving the distressed. And I do not despair of 
2 



14 

seeing the day, when but very few of this description as well 
as private families will be without them.'' 

Whether the motives assigned by this medical man to his 
professional brethren existed or not, it is true that Dr. Per- 
kins did not gain a great deal at their hands. The Connec- 
ticut Medical Society expelled him in 1797 for violating their 
law against the use of nostrums, or secret remedies. The 
leading English physicians appear to have looked on with 
singular apathy or contempt at the miracles, which it was pre- 
tended were enacting in the hands of the apostles of the new 
practice. In looking over the reviews of the time, I have 
found little beyond brief occasional notices of their preten- 
sions ; the columns of these journals being occupied with sub- 
jects of more permanent interest. The state of things in 
London is best learned, however, from the satirical poem to 
which I have already alluded as having been written at the 
period referred to. This was entitled, "Terrible Tractora- 
tion ! ! A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery and 
the Perkinistic Institution. Most respectfully addressed to 
the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M, 
D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Phy- 
sicians, Aberdeen, and honorary member of no less than nine- 
teen very learned societies." Two editions of this work 
were published in London in the years 1803 and 1804, and 
one or two have been published in this country. 

'' Terrible Tractoration" is supposed, by those who never 
read it, to be a satire upon the follies of Perkins and his fol- 
lowers. It is on the contrary, a most zealous defence of Per- 
kinism, and a fierce attack upon its opponents, most espe- 
cially upon such of the medical profession as treated the sub- 
ject with neglect or ridicule. The Royal College of Physi- 
cians was the more peculiar object of the attack, but with 
this body, the editors of some of the leading periodicals, and 
several physicians distinguished at that time, and even now 
remembered for their services to science and humanity, were 
involved in unsparing denunciations. The work is by no 
means of the simply humorous character it might be supposed, 
but is overloaded with notes of the most seriously polem- 
ical nature. Much of the history of the subject, indeed, is 
to be looked for in this volume. 

It appears from this work, that the principal members of the 
medical profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Doug- 
lass Perkins as another Harvey or Jenner, turned, the coldest 



15 

possible of shoulders upon him and his Tractors ; and it is now 
evident that though they were much abused for so doing, 
they knew very well what they had to deal with, and were 
altogether in the right. The delusion at last attracted such 
an amount of attention as to induce Dr. Haygarth and some 
others of respectable standing, to institute some experiments 
which I shall mention in their proper place, the result of 
which might have seemed sufficient to show the emptiness of 
the whole contrivance. 

The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has 
constituted the best tribunal that Britain can appeal to in 
questions of science, accepted Mr. Perkins's Tractors and 
the book written about them, passed the customary vote 
of thanks, and never thought of troubling itself further in the 
investigation of pretensions of such an aspect. It is not to 
be denied that a considerable number of physicians did 
avow themselves advocates of the new practice ; out of the 
w^hole catalogue of those who were publicly proclaimed 
as such, no one has ever been known, so far as I am 
aware, to the scientific world, except in connection with 
the short lived notoriety of Perkinism. Who were the per- 
sons, then, to whose activity, influence, or standing with the 
community was owing all the temporary excitement produced 
by the Metallic Tractors? 

First, those persons who had been induced to purchase a 
pair of Tractors. These little bits of brass and iron, the in- 
trinsic value of which might, perhaps, amount to ninepence, 
were sold at five guineas a pair ! A man who has paid twen- 
ty-five dollars for his whistle is apt to blow it louder and longer 
than other people. So it appeared that when the " Perkine- 
an Society" applied to the possessors of Tractors in the me- 
tropolis to concur in the establishment of a public institution 
for the use of these instruments upon the poor, " it was found 
that only five out of above a hundred objected to subscribe, 
on account of their want of confidence, in the efficacy of the 
practice, and these," the committee observes, " there is reason 
to believe, never gave them a fair trial, probably never used 
them in more than one case, and that perhaps a case in which 
the Tractors have never been recommended as serviceable." 
^^ Purchasers of the Tractors," said one of their ardent advo- 
cates, '' would be among the last to approve of them if they 
had reason to suppose themselves defrauded of five guineas.'* 
He forgot poor Moses, with his '^ gross of green spectacles, 
with silver rims and shagreen cases." *' Dear mother," cried 



16 

the boy, *^ why won't you listen to reason? I had them s 
dead bargain, or I should not have bought them. The silver 
rims alone will sell for double the money.'' 

But it is an undeniable fact^ that many persons of consid- 
erable standing, and in some instances, holding the most ele- 
vated positions in society^ openly patronized the new prac- 
tice. In a translation of a work entitled " Experiments with 
the Metallic Tractors," originally published in Danish, thence 
rendered successively into German and English, Mr. Benja- 
min Perkins, who edited the English edition, has given 
a copious enumeration of the distinguished individuals both 
in America and Europe, whose patronage he enjoyed. He 
goes so far as to signify that Royalty itself was to be in- 
cluded among the number. When the Perkinean Insti- 
tution was founded, no less a person than Lord Rivers 
was elected president, and eleven other individuals of dis- 
tinction, among them Governor Franklin, son of Dr. Frank- 
lin, figured as Vice Presidents. Lord Henniker, a mem- 
ber of the Royal Society, who is spoken of as a man of 
judgment and talents, condescended to patronize the aston- 
ishing discovery, and at different times bought three pairs of 
Tractors. When the Tractors were introduced into Europe, 
a large number of testimonials accompanied them from vari- 
ous distinguished characters in America, the list of whom is 
given in the translation of the Danish work referred to,, as 
follows, '^ Those who have individually stated cases, or who. 
have presented their names to the public as men who approv- 
ed of this remedy, and acknowledged themselves instrumen- 
tal in circulating the Tractors, are fifty-six in number ; thirty- 
four of whom are physicians and surgeons, and many of them 
of the first eminence, thirteen clergymen, most of whom are 
doctors of divinity, and connected with the literary institu- 
tions of America; among the remainder are two members of 
Congress, one professor of natural philosophy in a college,. 
&c. &c." It seemed to be taken rather hardly by Mr. Per- 
kins, that the translators of the work which he edited, in citing 
the names of the advocates of the Metallic Practice, frequent- 
ly omitted the honorary titles which should have been annex-* 
ed. The testimonials were obtained by the Danish writer, 
from a pamphlet published in America, in which these titles 
were given in full. Thus one of these testimonials is from 
** John Tyler, Esq., a magistrate in the county of New Lon-. 
don, and late Brigadier General of the militia in that State.'* 
The ** omission of the General's title," which is the subject 



17 

of complaint, must have been thought of so much consequence, 
because it showed great disrespect to the commanding powers 
of one of the patrons of tractoration. A similar complaint is 
made when '' Calvin Goddard, Esq., of Plainfield, Attorney at 
Law, and a member of the Legislature of the State of Connecti- 
cut," is mentioned without his titular honors, and even on ac- 
count of the omission of the proper official titles belonging to 
'' Nathan Pierce, Esq. Governor and Manager of the Almshouse 
of Newburyport." These instances show the great importance 
to be attached to civil and military dignities, in qualifying their 
holders to judge of scientific subjects, a truth which has not 
been overlooked by the legitimate successors of the Perkinists. 
In Great Britain, the Tractors were not less honored than in 
America, by the learned and the illustrious. The ^' Perkinistic 
Committee" made this statement in their report. ^^ Mr. Per- 
kins has annually laid before the public a large collection of 
new cases commuuicated to him for that purpose^ by disin- 
terested and intelligent characters, from almost every quarter 
of Great Britain. In regard to the competency of these 
vouchers, it w^ill be sufficient simply to state that, amongst 
others whose names have been attached to their communi- 
cations, are eight professors in four different universities, 
twenty-one regular Physicians, nineteen Surgeons, thirty 
Clergymen, twelve of whom are Doctors of Divinity, and nu- 
merous other characters of equal respectability." 

It cannot but excite our notice and surprise that the num- 
ber of clergymen both in America and Great Britain who 
thrust forward their evidence on this medical topic, was sin- 
gularly large in proportion to that of the members of the med- 
ical profession. Whole pages are contributed by such wor- 
thies as the Rev. Dr. Trotter of Hans Place, the Rev. War- 
ing Willett, Chaplain to the Earl of Dunmore, the Rev. Dr. 
Clarke, Chaplain to the Prince of Wales. The style of these 
theologico-medical communications may be seen in the fol- 
lowing from a divine who was also professor in one of the 
colleges of New England. '' I have used the Tractors with 
success in several other cases in my own family, and although 
like Naaman the Syrian, I cannot tell why the waters of Jor- 
dan should be better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Da- 
mascus ; yet since experience has proved them so, no reason- 
ing can change the opinion. Indeed, the causes of all com- 
mon facts are, we think, perfectly well known to us, and it is 
very probable, fifty or a hundred years hence, we shall as 
2* 



18 

well know why the Metallic Tractors should in a few minutes 
remove violent pains, as we now know why cantharides and 
opium will produce opposite effects, namely, we shall know 
very little about either excepting facts." Fifty or a hundred 
years hence ! if he could have looked forward forty years, he 
would have seen the descendants of the ^' Perkinistic" philos- 
ophers swallowing infinitesimal globules, and knowing and 
caring as much about the Tractors as the people at Sara- 
toga Springs do about the waters of Abana and Pharpar. 

I trust it will not be thought in any degree disrespectful to 
a profession which we all honor, that I have mentioned the 
great zeal of many clergymen in the cause of Perkinism. I 
hope, too, that I may without offence, suggest the causes 
which have often led them out of their own province into 
one to which their education has no special reference. 
The members of that profession ought to be, and com- 
monly are, persons of benevolent character. Their duties 
carry them into the midst of families, and particularly at 
times when the members of them are suffering from bodily 
illness. It is natural enough that a strong desire should be 
excited to alleviate sufferings which may have defied the 
efforts of professional skill ; as natural that any remedy 
which recommends itself to the belief or the fancy of the 
spiritual physician should be applied with the hope of ben- 
efit ; and perfectly certain that the weakness of human 
nature, from which no profession is exempt, will lead him to 
take the most flattering view of its effects upon the patient; 
his own sagacity and judgment being staked upon the suc- 
cess of the trial. The inventor of the Tractors was aware of 
these truths. He therefore sent gratuitously to clergymen, a 
pair of his Tractors, accompanied with a formal certificate 
that the holder had become entitled to their possession by 
the payment of five guineas. This was practised in our own 
neighborhood, and I remember finding one of these certifi- 
cates, so presented, which proved that among the risks of infan- 
cy I had to encounter Perkins's Tractors. Two clergymen of 
Boston and the vicinity, both well known to local fame, gave 
in their testimony to the va}ae of the instruments thus pre- 
sented to them ; an unusually moderate proportion, when it 
is remembered that to the common motives of which I have 
spoken, was added the seduction of a gift for which the pro- 
fane public was expected to pay so largely. 

It was remarkable, also, that Perkinism, which had so lit- 



19 

tie success with the medical and scientific part of the com- 
munity, found great favor in the eyes of its more lovely and 
less obstinate portion. '' The lady of Major Oxholm," — I 
quote from Mr. Perkins's volume — *' having been lately in 
America, had seen and heard much of the great effects of 
Perkinism. Influenced by a most benevolent disposition, 
she brought these Tractors and the pamphlet with her to Eu- 
rope, with a laudable desire of extending their utility to her 
suffering countrymen." Such was the channel by which the 
Tractors were conveyed to Denmark, where they soon be- 
came the ruling passion. The workmen, says a French 
writer, could not manufacture them fast enough. Women 
carried them about their persons, and delighted in bringing 
them into general use. To what extent the Tractors were 
favored with the patronage of English and American ladies, 
it is of course not easy to say, except on general principles, 
as their names were not brought before the public. But one 
of Dr. Haygarth's stories may lead us to conjecture, that there 
was a class of female practitioners who went about doing 
good with the Tractors in England as well as in Denmark. 
A certain lady had the misfortune to have a spot as big as a 
silver penny at the corner of her eye, caused by a bruise, or 
some such injury. Now, another lady, who was a friend of 
hers, and a strong believer in Perkinism, was very anxious to 
try the effects of tractoration upon this unfortunate blemish. 
The patient consented ; the lady ^' produced the instruments, 
and, after drawing them four or five times over the spot, de- 
clared that it changed to a paler color, and on repeating the 
use of them a few minutes longer, that it had almost van- 
ished, and was scarcely visible, and departed in high triumph 
at her success." The lady who underwent the operation, 
assured the narrator ^' that she looked in the glass immedi- 
ately after, and that not the least visible alteration had taken 
place." 

It would be a very interesting question, what was the in- 
tellectual character of those persons most conspicuous in be- 
half of the Perkinistic delusion ? Such an inquiry might bring 
to light some principles which we could hereafter apply to 
the study of other popular errors. But the obscurity into 
which nearly all these enthusiasts have subsided, renders the 
question easier to ask than to answer. I believe it would 
have been found that most of these persons were of ar- 
dent temperament and of considerable imagination, and 



20 

that their history would shew that Perkinism was not the 
first nor the last hobby horse they rode furiously. Many of 
them may very probably have been persons of more than 
common talent, of active and ingenious minds, of versatile 
powers and various acquirements. Such, for instance, was 
the estimable man to whom I have repeatedly referred as a 
warm defender of tractoration, and a bitter assailant of its 
enemies. The story tells itself in the biographical preface 
to his poem. He went to London with the view of intro- 
ducing a hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont 
friends regarded as a very important invention. He found, 
however, that the machine was already in common use in 
that metropolis. A brother Yankee, then in London, had 
started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by the 
water of the Thames. He was sanguine enough to pur- 
chase one fifth of this concern, which also proved a failure. 
At about the same period he wrote the work which proved 
the great excitement of his mind upon the subject of the 
transient folly then before the public. Originally a lawyer, 
he was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an editor, 
meeting with far less success in each of these departments 
than usually attends men of less varied gifts, but of more 
tranquil and phleg^matic composition. But who is ignorant 
that there is a class of minds characterised by qualities like 
those I have mentioned ; minds with many bright and even 
beautiful traits ; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly ; that 
settle upon every gaily colored illusion as it opens into flow- 
er, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its 
leaves and stands naked in the icy air of truth ! 

Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments 
addressed by believers to sceptics and opponents. Foremost 
of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest 
shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount 
to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable 
shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause 
against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent 
monosyllable, which has been the patrimony of cheats and the 
currency of dupes from time immemorial — Facts! Facts! 
Facts! Firstcame the published cases of the American clergy- 
men, brigadier generals, almshouse governors, representatives, 
attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published cases of 
the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of 
about one hundred and fifty cases published in England, 



i^ 



21 

" demonstrating the efficacy of the metallic practice in a va- 
riety of complaints both upon the human body and on horses, 
etc/' But the progress o^ facts in Great Britain did not 
stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their 
testimonials as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness 
and stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from 
the report of the Perkinistic Committee. " The cases pub- 
lished [in Great Britain] amounted, in March last, the date 
of Mr. Perkins's last publication, to about five thousand. 
Supposing that not more than one cure in three hundred 
which the Tractors have performed, has been published, and 
the proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that 
the number, to March last, will have exceeded one million 
five hundred thousand ! " 

Next in order, after the appeal to what were called facts, 
came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised 
and battered round in the cause of every doctrine or preten- 
sion, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of 
them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the 
faces of so many old acquaintances among the less repu- 
table classes, to the officers of police. 

No doubt many of my hearers will recognise in the fol- 
lowing passages, arguments they may have heard brought 
forward with triumphant confidence, in behalf of some doc- 
trine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have honestly 
thought they proved something; may have used them with 
the purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the 
opponents of their favorite doctrine, whatever that might 
be. But any train of arguments which was contrived for 
Perkinism, which was just as applicable to it as to any 
other new doctrine in the same branch of science, and which 
was fully employed against its adversaries forty years since, 
might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the 
grave of Perkinism. Whether or not the following senten- 
ces, taken literally from the work of Mr. Perkins, were the 
originals of some of the idle propositions we hear bandied 
about from time to time, let those who listen judge. 

The following is the test assumed for the new practice : 
*^ If diseases are really removed, as those persons who have 
practised extensively with the Tractors declare, it should 
seem there would be but little doubt of their being gen3rally 
adopted ; but if the numerous reports of their efficacy which 
have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded, the 



22 

practice ought to be crushed. '' To this I merely add, it has 
been crushed. 

The following sentence applies to that a priori judging 
and uncandid class of individuals who buy their dinners 
without tasting all the food there is in the market. ** On all 
discoveries there are persons, who, without descending to 
any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by 
intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest 
errors. These were those who knew that Harvey's report 
of the circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridicu- 
lous suggestion, and in latter [later] days there were others 
who knew that Franklin deserved reproach for declaring that 
points were preferable to balls for protecting buildings from 
lightning." 

Again : '^ This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion 
(or proof J so unauthorized and even unprecedented except in 
the condemnation of a Galileo, the persecution of a Coperni- 
cus, and a few other acts of inquisitorial authority, in the times 
of ignorance and superstition, affords but a lamentable in- 
stance of one of his remarks, that this is far from being the 
Age of Reason." 

'' The most valuable medicines in the materia medica act 
on principles of which we are totally ignorant. None have 
ever yet been able to explain how opium produces sleep 
— or how bark cures intermittent fevers ; and yet few, it is 
hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these 
important articles because they know nothing of the princi- 
ple of their operations." Or if the argument is preferred in 
the eloquent language of the Perkinistic poet — 

*' What though the causes may not be explained, 
Since these effects are duly ascertained, 
Let not self-interest, prejudice or piide, 
Induce mankind to set the means aside ; 
Means which, though simple, are by heaven designed 
T' alleviate the woes ot" human kind." 

This course of argument is so often employed that it de- 
serves to be expanded a little, so that its length and breadth 
may be fairly seen. A series of what are called facts are 
brought forward to prove some very improbable doctrine. 
It is objected by judicious people, or such as have devoted 
themselves to analogous subjects, that these assumed facts 
are in direct opposition to all that is known of the course 
of nature, that the universal experience of the past affords 
a powerful presumption against their truth, and that in 



II 



23 

proportion to the gravity of these objections, should be the 
number and competence of the witnesses. The answer is a 
ready one. What do we know of the mysteries of JNature? 
Do we understand the intricate machinery of the Universe? 
When to this is added the never failing quotation, 

" There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy — " 

the question is thought to be finally disposed of. 

Take the case of astrology as an example. It is in itself 
strange and incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies 
to each other at a given moment of time, perhaps half a cen- 
tury ago, should have anything to do with my successor mis- 
fortune in any undertaking of to-day. But what right have I 
to say it cannot be so 1 Can I bind the sw^eet influence of 
Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion ? I do not know by 
what mighty magic the planets roll in their fluid paths, con- 
fined to circles as unchanging as if they were rings of steel, 
nor why the great wave of ocean follows in a sleepless round 
upon the skirts of moonlight; nor can I say from any certain 
knowledge that the phases of the heavenly bodies, or even the 
falling of the leaves of the forest, or the manner in which the 
sands lie .upon the sea shore, may not be knit up by invisible 
threads with the web of human destiny. There is a class of 
minds much more ready to believe that w^hich is at first sight 
incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is general- 
ly thought reasonable. *' Credo quia impossibile est," I be- 
lieve because it is impossible, is an old paradoxical expression 
which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. And 
they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call 
out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic 
teachers maintained that there w^as not a verse, line, word, or 
even letter in the Bible that had not a special efticacy either 
to defend the person who rightly employed it, or to injure his 
enemies; always provided the original Hebrew was made 
use of In the hands of modern Cabalists every substance, 
no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues, 
provided it be used in a proper state of purity and subdivis- 
ion. 

I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the 
Perkinists to the Medical Profession, as preventing its mem- 
bers from receiving the new but unwelcome truths. This 



24 

accusation is repeated in different forms and places, as, for 
instance, in the following passage. 

^^ Will the medical man, who has spent much money and la- 
bor in the pursuit of the arcana of Physic, and on the exer- 
cise of which depends his support in life, proclaim the ineffi- 
cacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to his patient which 
the most unlettered in society can employ as advantageously 
as himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops, the 
pills, the powders, etc. of the Materia Medica, is inconsuma" 
hie, and ever in readiness to be employed in successive dis- 
eases?" 

As usual with these people, much indignation was express- 
ed at any parallel between their particular doctrine and prac- 
tice and those of their exploded predecessors. '^ The mo- 
tives," says the disinterested Mr. Perkins, '^ which must have 
impelled to this attempt at classing the Metallic Practice 
with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but too thinly 
veiled to escape detection." 

To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, 
an appeal to the feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffer- 
ing humanity, in the shape of a notice that the poor would be 
treated gratis. It is pretty well understood that this gratui- 
tous treatment of the poor, does not necessarily imply an ex- 
cess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous distribution 
of a trader's shop bills is an evidence of remarkable generosi- 
ty ; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men 
often do from the best motives, but which rogues and 
impostors never fail to announce as one of their special re- 
commendations. It is astonishing to see how these things 
brighten up at the touch of Mr. Perkins's poet. 

" Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few, 

The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you, 

Who in Humanity's bland cause unite, 

Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite ; 

Like the great Pattern of Benevolence, 

Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense ; 

And though opposed by folly's servile brood, 

Enjoy the luxury of doijvg good." 

Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days 
of prosperity ; having seen how it sprung into being, and by 
what means it maintained its influence, it only remains to tell 
the brief story of its discomfiture and final downfall. The 
vast majority of the sensible part of the medicaL profession 



2o 

were contented, so far as we can judge, to let it die out of itselfs 
It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable discovery 
exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy — in 
vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo 
and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation ; the 
Baillies and the Heberdens, — men whose names have come 
down to us as synonymous with honor and wisdom — bore their 
reproaches in meek silence, and left them unanswered to their 
fate. There were some others, however, who, believing the 
public to labor under a delusion, thought it worth while to 
see whether the charm would be broken by an open trial of 
its virtue, as compared with that of some less hallowed for- 
mula. It must be remembered that a peculiar value was at- 
tached to the Metallic Tractors, as made and patented by ]\Ir. 
Perkins. Dr. Haygarth of Bath, performed various experi- 
ments upon patients afflicted with different complaints — the 
patients supposing that the real five guinea Tractors were 
employed. Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful 
effects with Tractors of lead and of wood; with nails, pieces 
of bone, slate pencil, and tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson em- 
ployed sham Tractors made of wood, and produced such ef- 
fects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks in 
church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may 
stand for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for som.e months 
from pain in the right arm and shoulder. The Tractors 
(icooden ones) were applied, and in the space of five minutes 
she expressed herself relieved in the following apostrophe : 
*' Bless me! why who could have thought it, that them little 
things could pull the pain from one. Well, to be sure, the 
longer one lives, the more one sees; ah dear !^' 

These experiments did not result in the immediate extinc- 
tion of Perkinism. Doubtless they were a great comfort to 
many obstinate unbelievers, and helped to settle some scepti- 
cal minds; but for the real Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be 
questioned whether they would at that time have changed 
their opinion though one had arisen from the dead to assure 
them it was an error. It perished without violence, by an 
easy and natural process. Like the famous toy of Mongol- 
fier, it rose by means of heated air — the fevered breath of 
enthusiastic ignorance — and when this grew cool, as it al- 
ways does in a little while, it collapsed and fell. 

And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we ac- 
count for the extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkin- 
3 



26 

ism among a portion of what is supposed to be the thinking 
part of the community ? 

Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the prin- 
ciple of Animal Magnetism ? To this it may be answered 
that the Perkinists ridiculed the idea of approximating Mes- 
mer and the founder of their own doctrine, that nothing like 
the somnambulic condition seems to have followed the use of 
the Tractors, and that neither the exertion of the will, nor 
the powers of the individual who operated, seem to have been 
considered of any consequence. Besides, the absolute neg- 
lect into which the Tractors soon declined, is good evidence 
that they were incapable of affording any considerable and 
permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of which they 
were applied. 

Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely 
to nature ; which is true under every form of treatment, or- 
thodox or empirical. Of course many persons experienced 
at least temporary relief from the strong impression made 
upon their minds by this novel and marvellous method of 
treatment. 

Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those 
about them, like dying people, v/ho often say sincerely, from 
day to day, that they are getting better, cheated themselves 
into a false and short-lived belief that they were cured ; and 
as happens in such cases, the public never knew more than 
the first half of the story. 

When it was said to the Perkinists that whatever effects 
they produced were merely through the imagination, they de- 
clared (like the advocates of the Royal Touch, and the Un- 
GUENTUM Armarium) that this explanation was sufficiently 
disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures which 
had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Hay- 
garth replied to this, that *' in these cases it is not the Patient, 
but the Observer, who is deceived by his own imagination,'' 
and that such may be the fact, we have seen in the case of 
the good lady who thought she had conjured away the bunch 
from her friend's eye-lid, when it remained as large as ever. 

As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Trac- 
tors the facts must be allowed to speak for themselves. But 
, when two little bits of brass and iron are patented, as an in- 
vention, as the result of numerous experiments, when people 
are led, or even allowed to infer that they are a peculiar com- 
pound, when they are artfully associated with a new and 



27 

brilliant discovery, (which then happened to be Galvanism,) 
when they are sold at many hundred times their value, and 
the seller prints his opinion that a Hospital will suffer incon- 
venience '* unless it possesses many sets of the Tractors, 
and these placed in the hands of the patients to practise on 
each other," one cannot but suspect that they were contrived 
in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory ; that legs 
of ham in that region are not made of the best mahogany; 
and that such as buy their cucumber seed in that vicinity, 
have to w^ait for the fruit as long as the Indians for their crop 
of gunpowder. 



The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination 
of the doctrines of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; 
doctrines which some consider new and others old ; the com- 
mon title of which is variously known as H6-moeopathy, Ho- 
mcE-opathy, Homoe-op-athy, or Homoeo-path-y, and the claims 
of which are considered by some as infinitely important, and 
by many as immeasurably ridiculous. 

I wish to state for the sake of any who may be interested 
in the subject, that I shall treat it not by ridicule, but by ar- 
gument; perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper 
and in peaceable language ; with very little hope of reclaim- 
ing converts, with no desire of making enemies, but with a 
firm belief that its pretensions and assertions cannot stand 
before a single hour of calm investigation. 



LECTURE II. 



It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretenr 
sions of Homoeopathy is an uncalled for aggression upon an 
unoffending doctrine and its peaceful advocates. 

But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so 
hostile a position with respect to the Medical Profession, that 
any trouble I, or any other member of that profession may 
choose to bestow upon it, may be considered merely as a 
matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt to shew 
the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not 
only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it de- 
clared the common practice to be attended with the most 
positively injurious effects, that by it acute diseases are ag- 
gravated, and chronic diseases rendered incurable. It has 
at various times brought forward collections of figures having 
the air of statistical documents, pretending to shew a great 
proportional mortality among the patients of the Medical 
Profession, as compared with those treated according to its 
own rules. Not contented with choosing a name of classical 
origin for itself, it invented one for the whole community of 
innocent physicians, assuring them, to their great surprise, 
that they were all Allopath rsTs, whether they knew it or 
not, and including all the illustrious masters of the past, from 
Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the sam^e gratuitous title. 
The line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new 
doctrine ; they have lifted the lance, they have sounded the 
charge, and are responsible for any little skirmishing that 
may happen. 

But, independently of any such grounds of active resist- 



29 

ance, the subject involves interests so disproportioned to its 
intrinsic claims, that it is no more than an act of humanity 
to give it a public examination. If the new doctrine is not 
truth, it is a dangerous, a deadly error. If it is a mere illu- 
sion, and acquires the same degree of influence that we have 
often seen obtained by other illusions, there is not one of my 
audience who may not have occasion to deplore the fatal 
credulity that listened to its promises. 

I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its 
principles, its facts, and some points of its history. The 
limited time at my disposal requires me to condense as much 
as possible what I have to say, but I shall endeavor to be 
plain and direct in expressing it. Not one statement shall 
be made which cannot be supported by unimpeachable refer- 
ence ; not one word shall be uttered which I am not as will- 
ing to print as to speak. I have no quibbles to utter, and I 
shall stoop to answer none ; but with full faith in the suffi- 
ciency of a plain statement of facts and reasons, I submit 
the subject to the discernment of my audience. 

The question may be asked in the outset, — Have you 
submitted the doctrines you are professing to examine to the 
test of long repeated and careful experiment ; have you tried 
to see whether they were true or not ? To this I answer, 
that it is abundantly evident from what has often happened, 
that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the 
results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again 
and again have the most explicit statements been made by 
the most competent persons of the utter failure of all their 
trials, and there were the same abundant explanations offered 
as used to be for theUnguentum Armarium and the Metallic 
Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments 
the result of which could not be easily explained away so as 
to be of no conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments 
in favor of Homoeopathy are constantly addressed to the public 
in journals, pamphlets, and even lectures, by inexperienced 
dilettanti, the same channel must be open to all its oppo- 
nents. 

It is necessary for the sake of those to whom the whole sub- 
ject may be new, to give in the smallest possible compass the 
substance of the Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahne- 
mann, its founder, is a German physician, now living in Paris, 
at the age of 87 years. — In 1796 he published the first paper 



30 

containing his peculiar notions ; in 1805 his first work on 
the subject; in 1810 his somewhat famous Organon of the 
Healing Art; the next year what he called the Pure Materia 
Medica, and in 1828 his last work, the Treatise on Chronic 
Diseases. — He has therefore been writing at intervals on his 
favorite subject for nearly half a century. 

The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of 
Homoeopathy as a system, is expressed by the Latin aphorism, 

'' SiMILIA SIMILIBUS CURANTUR,'' 

or nice cures like^ that is, diseases are cured by agents capa- 
ble of producing symptoms resembling those found in the 
disease under treatment. A disease for Hahnemann consists 
essentially in a group of symptoms. The proper medicine 
for any disease is the one which is capable of producing a 
similar group of symptoms, when given to a healthy person. 

It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of 
symptoms excited by different substances, when administered 
to persons in health, if any such can be shown to exist. 
Hahnemann and his disciples give catalogues of the symp- 
toms which they affirm were produced upon themselves or 
others by a large number of drugs which they submitted to 
experiment. 

The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to 
have established, is the e^icacy of medicinal substances re- 
duced to a wonderful degree of imnufeness or dilution. The 
following account of his mode of preparing his medicines, is 
from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I believe, 
yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance, 
if it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to about a 
third part of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an un- 
glazed porcelain capsule, which has had the polish removed 
from the lower part of its cavity by rubbing it with wet 
sand ; they are to be mingled for an instant with a bone or 
horn spatula, and then rubbed together for six minutes: then 
the mass is to be scraped together from the mortar and 
pestle, which is to take four minutes; then to be again 
rubbed for six minutes. Four minutes are then to be de- 
voted to scraping the powder into a heap, and the second 
third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk to be added. 
Then they are to be stirred an instant and rubbed six min- 
utes — again to be scraped together four minutes and forcibly 
rubbed six ; once more scraped together for four minutes, 
when the last third of the hundred grains of sugai' of milk is 



31 

to be added and mingled by stirring with the spatula ; six 
minutes of forcible rubbing, four of scraping together, and 
six more (positively the last six) of rubbing, finish this part 
of the process. 

Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a 
grain of the medicinal substance mingled with the sugar af 
milk. — If, therefore, a grain of the powder just prepared is / 
mingled with another hundred grains of sugar of milk, and 
the process just described repeated, we shall have a powder of 
which every grain contains the hundredth of the hundredth, or 
the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal substance. 
Repeat the same process with the same quantity of fresh 
sugar of milk, and every grain of your powder will contain 
the millionth of a grain of the medicinal substance. — When 
the powder is of this strength, it is proper to employ in the 
further solutions and dilutions to be made use of in practice. 

A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of 
alcohol to be poured on it, the vial to be slowly turned for a 
few minutes, until the powder is dissolved, and two shakes 
to be given to it. On this point I will quote Hahnemann's 
own words. *^ A long experience and multiplied obser- 
vations upon the sick lead me within the last few yeai's 
to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, 
whereas I formerly used to give ten." — The process of dilu- 
tion is carried on in the same way as the attenuation of the 
powder was done ; each successive dilution with alcohol re- 
ducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of 
that which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the 
original millionth of a grain of medicine contained in the 
grain of powder operated on, is carried successively to the 
billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth, quintillionth, and very 
often much higher fractional divisions. A dose of any of 
these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop, obtained by 
moistening with them one or more little globules of sugar, 
of which Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to 
weigh a grain. 

As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed 
by Hahnemann, I will mention carbonate of lime. He does 
not employ common chalk, but prefers a little portion of the 
friable part of an oyster shell. Of this substance, carried to 
the sextillionth degree, so much as one or two globules of 
the size mentioned can imbibe, is a common dose. But for 
persons of very delicate nerves it is proper that the dilution 



32 

should be carried to the decillionth degree. That is, an im- 
portant medicinal effect is to be expected from the two hun- 
dredth or hundredth part of the millionth of the millionth of 
the millionth of the millionth, of the millionth of the mil- 
lionth of the millionth, of the millionth, of the millionth of 
the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only the 
tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to 
have obtained palpable effects from much higher dilutions. "^ 

The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following. 
Seven-eighths at least of all chronic diseases are produced by 
the existence in the system of that infectious disorder known 
m the language of science by the appellation of Psora, but 
to the less refined portion of the community by the name of 
Itch. In the words of Hahnemann's Organon, '^ This Psora 
is the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the 
other countless forms of disease, which, under the names of 
nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, insanity, melan- 
choly, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and spasms of all kinds, 
softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliasis and cyphosis, 
caries, cancer, fungus hematodes, gout — yellow jaundice and 
cyanosis, dropsy — gastralgia, epistaxis, hemoptysis — asthma 
and suppuration of the lungs — megrim, deafness, cataract 
and amaurosis, — paralysis, loss of sense, pains of every kind^ 
&/C., appear in our pathology as so many peculiar, distinct 
and independent diseases." 

For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be 
trusted, under the influence of the more refined personal 
habits which have prevailed, and the application of various 
external remedies which repel the affection from the skin, 

* The degrees of dilution must not be confounded with those of po- 
tency. Their relations may be seen by this table. 

1st dilution, — One hundredth of a drop or grain. 
2d " One ten thousandth, 

3d " One millionth, — marked I. 

4th " One hundred millionth. 

5th " One ten thousand milhonth. 

6th *' One million millionth, or one billionth — marked II. 

7th " One hundred billionth. 

8th ** One ten thousand billionth. 

9th " One million billionth, or one trillionth — marked III. 

10th " One hundred trillionth. 

11th " One ten thousand trillionth. 

12th " One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth — marked 

[IV. — and so on indefinitely. 
The large figures denote the degrees of potency. 



33 

Psora has revealed itself in these numerous forms of internal 
disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods, under the 
aspect of an external malady. 

These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as 
laid down in those standard works of Homoeopathy, the Or- 
ganon and the Treatise on Chronic Diseases. 

Several other principles may be added, upon all of which 
he insists with great force, and w^hich are very generally re- 
ceived by his disciples. 

1. Very little pow-er is allowed to the curative eiforts of 
nature. Hahnemann goes so far as to say, that no one has 
ever seen the simple efforts of nature effect the durable re- 
covery of a patient from a chronic disease. In general, the 
Homoeopathist calls every recovery which happens under his 
treatment a cure. 

2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a 
state of the most perfect purity, and uncom.bined with any 
other. The union of several remedies in a single prescrip- 
tion destroys its utility, and, according to the Organon, fre- 
quently adds a new disease. 

3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be 
inert, develope great medicinal powders when prepared in the 
manner already described ; and a great proportion of them 
are ascertained to have specific antidotes in case their exces- 
sive effects require to be neutralized. 

4. Diseases should be recognised, as far as possible, not 
by any of the common names imposed upon them, as fever or 
(Epilepsy, but as individual collections of symptoms, each of 
which differs from every other collection. 

5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described 
with the most minute exactness, and as far as possible in the 
patient's own words. To illustrate the kind of circum- 
stances the patient is expected to record, I will mention one 
or two from the 313th page of the Treatise on Chronic Dis- 
eases — being the first one to which I opened accidentally. 

^' After dinner, disposition to sleep ; the patient winks." 
" Afler dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine 
days after taking the remedy.^') 

This remedy was that same oystersheil which is to be pre- 
scribed in fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree. 
According to Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the 
size mentioned does not fully display itself in some cases, until 
twenty-four or even thirty days after it is taken, and in such in- 



34 

stances has not exhausted its good effects until towards the 
fortieth or fiftieth day — before which time it would be ab- 
surd and injurious to administer a new remedy. 

So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have 
been stated without comment, or exaggeration of any of their 
features, very much as any adherent of his opinions might 
have stated them, if obliged to compress them into so narrow 
a space. 

Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it 
now exists ? He certainly ought to be its best repre- 
sentative, after having created it, and devoted his life to it 
for half a century. He is spoken of as the great physician 
of the time, in most, if not all homoeopathic works. If he is 
not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is 7 
So far as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so 
called science, has ever been ascribed to any other observer ; 
at least, no general principle or law, of consequence enough to 
claim any prominence in homoeopathic works, has ever been 
pretended to have originated with any of his illustrious disci- 
ples. He is one of the only two homoeopathic writers with whom 
as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have any thing to 
do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual 
is little more than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. 
If any persons choose to reject Hahnemann as not in the 
main representing Homoeopathy, if they strike at his author- 
ity, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and formally 
announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness, for upon 
his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as 
embodied in his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, 
repose the foundations of Homoeopathy as a practical system. 

So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made 
upon the subject, the following is the present condition of 
belief 

1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is 
the only fundamental principle in medicine. Of course, if 
any man does not agree to this, the name Homoeopathist can 
no longer be applied to him with propriety. 

2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses 
is general, and in some places universal among the advocates 
of Homoeopathy ; but a distinct movement has been made in 
Germany to get rid of any restriction to the use of these 



85 

doses, and to employ medicines with the same license as other 
practitioners. 

3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in 
Psora, notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve 
years of study and research to establish the fact and its prac- 
tical consequences, has met with great neglect and even 
opposition from very many of his own disciples. 

It is true, notwithstanding, that throughout most of their 
writings which I have seen, there runs a general tone of great 
deference to Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to 
his authority, a general agreement with the minor points of 
his belief, and a pretence of harmonious union in a common 
faith.* 

Many persons and most physicians and scientific men would 
be satisfied with the statement of these doctrines and exam- 
ine them no farther. They would consider it vastly more 
probable that any observer in so fallacious and difficult a 
field of inquiry as medicine, had been led into error, or 
walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous 
and extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They 
would feel a right to exercise the same obduracy towards 
them as the French Institute is in the habit of displaying 
when memoirs or models are offered to it, relating to the 
squaring of the circle or perpetual motion ; which it is the 
rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astron- 
omers and natural philosophers must have felt when some 
half a dozen years ago, an unknown man came forward, and 
asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to Arago and his 
colleagues, that the moon and planets were at a distance of a 
little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so 
they would not even look into Homoeopathy, notwithstanding 
that all its advocates should exclaim in the words of Mr. Ben- 
jamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic Tractors, that 
*' On all discoveries there are persons who without descend- 
ing to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know as it were 
by intuition that newly asserted facts are founded in the 
grossest errors. '' And they would lay their heads upon their 
pillows with a perfectly clear conscience, although they were 
assured that they were behaving in the same way that people 

** Those who will take the trouble to look over Hull's Translation of 
Jahr's Manual, may observe how little comparative space is given to 
remedies resting upon any other authority than Hahnemann. 



36 



of old did towards Harvey, Galileo and Copernicus, the 
identical great names which were invoked by Mr. Benja- 
min Douslass Perkins. c .x, ^ 

But experience has shown that the character of these as- 
sertions is not sufficient to deter many from exammmg their 
claims to belief I therefore lean but very slightly on the 
extravagance and extreme apparent singularity of their pre- 
tensions I might have omitted them, but on the whole it 
seemed more just to the claims of my argument to suggest 
the vast complication of improbabilities involved m the state- 
ments enumerated. Every one must of course judge for 
himself as to the weight of these objections, which are by no 
means brought forward as a proof of the extravagance of 
SomcBopathy, but simply as entitled to a brief consideration 
before the facts of the case are submitted to our scrutmy. 

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are 
entirely unconnected with and independent of each other 
Were there any natural relation between them it wou d 
seem probable enough that the discovery of the first would 
have led to that of the others. But assuming that diseases 
are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms like 
their own to be a fact, no manifest relation exists between 
this fact and the next assertion, namely, the power of the 
nfinitesimal doses. And allowing both these to be true, 
neith r has the remotest affinity to the third new doctrine 
that which declares seven-eighths of all chronic diseases to be 

''Thi^ wanT of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's 
three cardinal doctrines, appears to be self-evident, upon in- 
spection. But if, as is often true with his discip es, they pre- 
fer fhe authority oi one of their own number, I wdl refer them 
to Dr Trinks's paper on the present state of Homceopath; 
n Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as his 
name is mentioned as one of the most promment champions 
ofTheir faith, in their American official organ. It would be a 
?act without a parallel in the history, not merely of medicme, 
but o science! that three such unconnected and as onishing 
Tscoveries, each of them a complete revolution of all that 
tes of the most varied experience had been taught to believe, 
sSould spring full formed from the brain of a single indi- 

"' Lel'us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Im- 
probable though it may seem to some, there is no essential 



37 

absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to 
remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, 
on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of 
plausibility to the statement. There are well ascertained 
facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing 
that under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, 
from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the 
disease, may contribute to its relief I may be permitted to 
allude in the most general w^ay, to the case in which the spon- 
taneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the 
agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon 
any terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine, 
should have been founded upon this principle, although with- 
out the knowledge of the physician, that the Homoeopathic 
axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, 'Hhe sole law of nature in 
therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient 
glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of med- 
ical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and preg- 
nant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and 
depth of unquestionable facts, to cover its vast pretensions. 

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended 
powers of the minute doses, that I shall only touch upon this 
point for the purpose of conveying, by illustrations, some 
shadow of ideas far transcending the powers of the imagina- 
tion to realize. It must be remembered, that these compar- 
isons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on 
simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any 
intelligent school boy. A person who once wrote a very small 
pamphlet, made some show of objecting to calculations of 
this kind, on the ground that the highest dilutions could easi- 
ly be made with a few ounces of alcohol. But he should 
have remembered that at every successive dilution, he lays 
aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on 
which he is operating, and that, although he begins with a 
drop, he only prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and 
similar fractions of it, all of which, added together, would 
constitute but a vastly minute portion of the drop with which 
he began. But now let us suppose we take one single drop 
of the tincture of chamomile, and that the icliole of this were 
to be carried through the common series of dilutions. 

A calculation nearly like the following, was made by Dr. 
Panvini, and may be readily followed in its essential particu- 
lars, by any one who chooses. 
4 



38 

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol. 

For the second dilution it would take 10,000 drops, or 
about a pint. 

For the third dilution, it would take 100 pints. 

For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more 
than 1000 gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which 
would take ten billion gallons, which he computed would 
fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of water two miles in 
circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course fill a 
million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of 
dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal 
m quantity the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Tri- 
fling errors must be expected, but they are as likely to be on 
one side as the other, and any little matter like lake Supe- 
rior or the Caspian would be but a drop in the bucket. 

Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened 
in the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each 
two miles in circumference, with which had been blended 
that one drop of Tincture of Chamomile, would be of precise- 
ly the strength recommended for that medicine in your favor- 
ite Jahr's Manual, against the most sudden, frightful and fa- 
tal diseases! *' 

And proceeding on the comm.on data, I have just made a 
calculation which shows that this single drop of Tincture of 
Chamomile, given in the quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, 
would have supplied every individual of the whole human 
family past and present, with more than five billion doses 
each, the action of each dose lasting about four days. 

Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of 
potency, and various substances are frequently administered at 
the decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher 
attenuations with professed medicinal results. Is there not in 
this as great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of 
nature, as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Ask this 

^ In the French Edition of 1834, the proper doses of the medi- 
cines are mentioned, and Chamomile is marked IV. — Why are the 
doses omitted in Hull's Tianslation, except in three instances out of the 
whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the promise in the pre- 
face, that '* some remarks upon the doses used— mayhe found at the head 
of each medicine " ? Possibly because it makes no difference whether 
they are employed in one homoeopathic dose or another ; but then it ia 
very singular that such precise directions were formerly given in the 
same work, and that Hahnemann's " experience " should have led him 
to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this Lec- 
ture, (p. 31.) 



1 



39 

question of a Homoeopathist, and he will answer by referring 
to the effects produced by a very minute portion of vaccine 
matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But the vac- 
cine matter is one of those substances called morbid 'poisons ^ 
of which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, 
when introduced into the system, as a seed does in the soil. 
Therefore the hundredth part of a grain of the vaccine mat- 
ter, if no more than this is employed, soon increases in quan- 
tity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a grain or 
more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what 
is a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it never produ- 
ces symptoms of any consequence, until it is already in suffi- 
cient quantity not merely to be visible, but to be collected 
for further use. The thoughtlessness which can allow an in- 
ference to be extended from a product of disease possessing 
this susceptibility of multiplication when conveyed into the 
living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as silex 
or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may 
produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest. 
As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action 
of the infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some very 
odorous substances which possess the extraordinary power of 
diffusing their imponderable emanations through a very wide 
space, however it may be abused in argument, and rapidly as 
it evaporates on examination, it is not like that just mentioned, 
wholly inexcusable. The fact of the vast diffusion of some 
odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has long 
been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisi- 
bility of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this 
were compared with the effects of a very minute dose of mor- 
phia on the whole system, or the sudden and fatal impression 
of a single drop of prussic acid, or with what comes still near- 
er, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere impregnated 
with invisible malaria^ we should find in each of these exam- 
ples, an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few 
instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or sub- 
tile forms of matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle 
and mortar in his hand, and tells me that he will take a little 
speck of some substance which nobody ever thought to have 
any smell at all, as for instance, a grain of chalk or of char- 
coal, and that he will af\er an hour or two of rubbing and 
scraping, develope in it an odor which shall be capable of 
pervading a whole apartment, a house, a village, a province, 



40 

' an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of this broad planet 
upon which we tread ; and that from each of fifty or sixty 
substances, he can in this way develope a distinct and hitherto 
unknown odor ; and if he tries to show that all this is render- 
ed quite reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall 
certainly be justified in considering him incapable of reason- 
ing, and beyond the reach of my argument. What if, instead 
of this, he professes to develope new and wonderful medicin- 
al powers from the same speck of chalk or charcoal, in such 
quantity as would impregnate every pond, lake, river, sea and 
ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in favor 
of the probability of his assertion ? 

All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. 
But so extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of 
substances which a child might swallow without harm by the 
tea-spoonful, could, by an easy mechanical process, be made 
to develope such inconceivable powers, *that nothing but the 
strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters, se- 
cured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, 
appealing to repeated experiments in public, with every pre- 
caution to guard against error, and with the most plain and 
peremptory results, should induce us to lend any credence to 
such pretensions. 

The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you 
remember, is the cause of the great majority of chronic dis- 
eases, is a startling one, to say the least. That an affection 
always recognised as a very unpleasant personal companion, 
but generally regarded as a m.ere temporary incommodity, 
readily yielding to treatment in those unfortunate enough to 
suflfer from it, and hardly known among the better classes of 
society, should be all at once found out by a German physi- 
cian, to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of their 
severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consump- 
tion, idiocy and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise. 
And when the originator of this singular truth, ascribes, as in 
the page now open before me, the declining health of a dis- 
graced courtier, the chronic malady of a bereaved mother, 
even the melancholy of the love sick and slighted maiden, to 
nothing more or less than the insignificant, unseemly, and 
almost unmentionable itch, does it not seem as if the very 
soil upon which we stand, was dissolving into chaos, over the 
earthquake heaving of discovery ? 

And when one man claims to have established these three 



41 

independent truths, which are about as remote from each 
other, as the discovery of the law of gravitation, the invention 
of printing, and that of the mariner's compass, unless the facts 
in their favor are overwhelming and unanimous, the question 
naturally arises — is not this man deceiving himself^ or trying 
to deceive others ? 

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of 
Hahnemann and his school. 

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curanturj (or 
like is cured by like,) to be the basis of the healing art — 
*^ the sole law of nature in therapeutics,*' — it is necessary, 

1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy per- 
sons, should be faithfully studied and recorded. 

2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of 
curing those diseases most like their own symptoms. 

3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases 
when they do not produce symptoms resembling those pre- 
sented in these diseases. 

1, The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been 
studied by Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were 
made known in his Materia Medica, a work in three large 
volumes in the French translation, published about eight years 
ago. The mode of experimentation appears to have been, to 
take the substance on trial, either in common or minute doses, 
and then to set down every little sensation, every little move- 
ment of mind or body, which occurred within many succeed- 
ing hours or days, as being produced solely by the substance 
employed. When I have enumerated some of the symptoms 
attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will be able 
to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions 
of such observers. 

The following list was taken literally from the Materia 
Medica of Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose 
accuracy I am willing to be responsible. He has given seven 
pages of these symptoms, not selected, but taken at hazard 
from the French translation of the work. I shall be very 
brief in my citations. 

*^ After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about 
the head, upon resumiing the erect posture." 

*^ An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edige of the 
palm of the left hand, which obliges the person to scratch.'* 
The medicine was acetate of lime, and as the action of the 
4* 



42 

globule taken is said to last twenty-eight days, you may judge 
how many such symptoms as the last, might be supposed to 
happen. 

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid, are these ; 
a catarrh — sighing — pimples — ^' after having written a long 
time with the back a little bent over, violent pain in the back 
and shoulder blades, as if from a strain," — '^ dreams which are 
not remembered — disposition to mental dejection— wakeful- 
ness before and after midnight." 

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have 
not cited these specimens with any view to exciting a sense 
of the ridiculous, which many others of those mentioned 
would not fail to do, but to show that the common accidents 
of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences to which all of us 
are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed to what- 
ever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute 
doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously. 

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, 
whether deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illus- 
trate, to be produced by the substance in question. 

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances ascertained 
by one or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Mate- 
ria Medica of Hahnemann, which may be considered as the 
basis of practical Homoeopathy. In the Manual of Jahr, which 
is the common guide, as far as I know, of those who practice 
Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred remedies are enu- 
merated, many of which, however, have never been employed 
in practice. In at least one edition, there were no means of 
distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick, from 
the others. It is true that marks have been added in the edition 
employed here, which serve to distinguish them, but what are 
we to think of a standard prac^zcaZ author on Materia Medica, 
who at one time omits to designate the proper doses of his 
remedies, and at another, to let us have any means of know- 
ing whether a remedy has ever been tried or not, while he 
is recommending its employment in the most critical and 
threatening diseases? 

I think that from what I have shown of the character of 
Hahnemann's experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any 
candid inquirer, to know whether other persons, to whose 
assertions he could look with confidence, confirm these pre- 
tended facts. Now there are many individuals, long and well 
known to the scientific world, who have tried these experi- 



43 

ments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their ef- 
fects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions. 

I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral, (and I 
am not referring to his well know^n public experiments in his 
hospital,) as to the result of his own trials. This distinguish- 
ed physician is Professor of Medicine in the School of Paris, 
and one of the most widely known and valued authors upon 
practical and theoretical subjects the profession can claim in 
any country. He is a man of great kindness of character, a 
most liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned in- 
tegrity, and is called, in the leading article of the first num- 
ber of the Homoeopathic Examiner, ^' an eminent and very 
enlightened allopathist." Assisted by a number of other 
persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of 
cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly 
extolled remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he 
stated publicly to the Academy of Medicine, that they never 
produced the slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed 
to them. The results of a man like this, so extensively 
known as one of the most philosophical and candid, as well 
as brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable abilities, and 
great liberality, are generally conceded, ought to be of great 
weight in deciding the question. 

M. Double, a well known medical writer and a physician 
of high standing in Paris, had occasion as long ago as 1801, 
before he had heard of Homoeopathy, to make experiments 
upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and several others 
took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and the 
fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite, never was 
produced. 

M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of 
Bourdeaux, had occasion to observe many soldiers during 
the peninsular w^ar, who made use of cinchona as a preserv- 
ative against different diseases — but he never found it to 
produce the pretended paroxysms. 

If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I 
would refer to the express experiments on many of the 
Homoeopathic substances, given to healthy persons, instituted 
with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by M. Louis 
Fleury, without the slightest of the pretended consequences 
resulting. — And let me mention as a curious fact, that the 
same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common 
form of the unprepared powder, and to another after having 



44 

been rubbed up into six hundred globules, offered no par- 
ticular difference of activity in the two cases. This is a 
strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of 
what they call by an ingenious pleonasm '* dynamic power," 
by means of friction and subdivision. 

And in 1835, a public challenge was offered to the best 
known Homoeopathic physician in Paris to select any ten 
substances asserted to produce the most striking effects ; to 
prepare them himself; to choose one by lot without knowing 
which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or any 
intelligent and devoted HomcEopathist, and waiting his own 
time, to come forward and tell what substance had been em- 
ployed. — The challenge was at first accepted, but the accep- 
tation retracted before the time of trial arrived. 

From all this I think it fair to conclude, that the catalogues 
of symptoms:attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influ- 
ence of various drugs upon healthy persons, are not entitled 
to any confidence. 

2. It is necessary to show in the next place that medicinal 
substances are always capable of curing diseases most like 
their own symptoms. For facts relating to this question we 
must look to two sources ; the recorded experience of the 
medical profession in general ; and the results of trials 
made according to homoeopathic principles, and capable 
of testing the truth of the doctrine. 

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some 
cases there exists a resemblance between the effects of a rem- 
edy and the symptoms of diseases in which it is beneficial. 
This has been recognised, as Hahnemann himself has shown, 
from the time of Hippocrates. But according to the records of 
the medical profession, as they have been hitherto inter- 
preted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful 
remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established 
truth that the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any 
definite ratio to their power of producing symptoms more or 
less like those they cured. 

Such was the state of opinion, when Hahnemann came 
forward with the proposition that all the cases of successful 
treatment found in the works of all preceding medical writers, 
were to be ascribed solely to the operation of the homoeopa- 
thic principle, which had effected the cure, although without 
the physician's knowledge that this was the real secret. And 
strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a degree 



45 

of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquaint- 
ed somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I 
should rather say, with the relative value of medical evidence, 
according to the sources whence it is derived, would be 
almost frightened into the belief, at seeing the pages upon 
pages of Latin names he has summoned as his witnesses. 

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writ* 
ings of authors of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which 
they w^ere less enlightened than ourselves, and w-hich they 
were very liable to misrepresent, to exercise some little dis- 
cretion ; to discriminate, in some measure, between writers 
deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But there 
is not the least appearance of any such delicacy on the part 
of Hahnemann. A large majority of the names of old au- 
thors he cites are w holly unknown to science. With some 
of them I have been long acquainted, and I know that their 
accounts of diseases are no more to be trusted than their 
contemporary Ambrose Fare's stories of mermen, and similar 
absurdities. But if my judgment is rejected, as being a preju- 
diced one, I can refer to Cullen, who mentioned three of 
Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as being ^^ not neces- 
sarily bad authorities ; but certainly such when they deliv- 
ered very improbable events;" and as this was said more 
than half a. century ago, it could not have had any reference 
to Hahnemann. But although not the slightest sign of dis- 
crimination is visible in his quotations — although for him a 
handful of chaff from Schenck is all the same thing as a measure 
of wheat from Morgagni, there is a formidable display of 
authorities, and an abundant proof of ingenious researches 
to be found in each of the great works of Hahnemann v/ith 
which I am familiar.* 

It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of 
Leipsic, has proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from 
old authors to be adulterate and false. What particular in- 
stances he has pointed out I have no means of learning. 
And it is probably wholly impossible on this side of the 
Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries of Europe, 
to find any thing more than a small fraction of the innu- 

* Some painful surmises might arise as to the erudition of Hahne- 
mann's EngUsh Translator, who makes two individuals of " Zacutus, 
Lucitanus," as well as respecting that of the conductors of an American 
Homoeopathic periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned 
Cardanus to be spelt Carda??ius in at least three places, were not this 
gross ignorance of course attributable only to the printer. 



46 

merable obscure publications which the neglect of grocers 
and trunk makers has spared to be ransacked by the all-devour- 
ing genius of Homoeopathy. I have endeavored to verify 
such passages as my own library afforded me the means of 
doing. For some I have looked in vain, for want, as I am 
willing to believe, of more exact references. But this I am 
able to affirm, that out of the very small number which I 
have been able to trace back to their original authors, I have 
found two to be wrongly quoted, one of them being a 'gross 
misrepresentation. 

The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Au- 
relianus ; the second from the venerable folio of Forestus. 
Hahnemann uses the following expressions, — if he is not 
misrepresented in the English Translation of the Organon; 
^'Asclepiades on one occasion cured an inflammation of the 
brain by administering a small quantity of wine." After 
correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can 
find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius 
Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by 
Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as 
being in the highest degree irrational and dangerous. "^ 

In speaking of the oil of aniseed, Hahnemann says that 
Forestus observed violent colic caused by its administration. 
But as that author tells the story, a young man took, by the 
counsel of a surgeon, an acrid and virulent medicine, the 
name of which is not given, which brought on a most cruel 
fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was 
called, who gave him oil of aniseed and wine, which in- 
creased his suffering.t Now if this was the Homoeopathic 
remedy, as Hahnemann pretends, it might be a fair question 
why the young man was not cured by it. But it is a much 
graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning 
enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to 
treat them with such astonishing negligence or such artful 
unfairness. 

Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old 
authorities were to be found in them, even if the authority 
of every one of these authors were beyond question, the 
looseness with which they are used to prove whatever 
Hahnemann chooses, is beyond the bounds of credibility. 
Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of this 

* Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. Lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi. 
Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755. 

t Observ. et Curat. Med. Lib. XXL obs. xiii. Frankfort, 1614. 



47 

man's mind. Hahnemann asserts in a note annexed to the 
110th paragraph of the Organon, that the smell of the rose 
will cause certain persons to faint. And he says in the text 
that substances which produce peculiar effects of this nature 
on particular constitutions, cure the same symptoms in peo- 
ple in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph, 
he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one 
would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine 
Historians. 

'' It was by these means '^ (i. e. Homoeopathically) *^ that 
the Princess Eudosia with rose water restored a person who 
had fainted !" 

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic 
folly as this ; a man who can see a confirmation of his doc- 
trine in such a recovery as this ; a recovery which is hap- 
pening every day — from a breath of air — a drop or two of 
water — untying a bonnet string — loosening a stay-lace — and 
which can hardly help happening, whatever is done ; is it 
possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there one, 
but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, 
is the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth 
century ! 

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. 
An experiment is instituted with some drug upon one or 
more healthy persons. Every thing that happens for a num- 
ber of weeks or days is, as we have seen, set down as an 
effect of the medicine. Old volumes are then ransacked 
promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change, that 
any body ever said was produced by the drug in question is 
added to the list of symptoms. By one or both of these meth- 
ods, each of the sixty-four substances enumerated by Hahne- 
mann is shown to produce a very large number of symp- 
toms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the 
highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one. And having made 
out this list respecting any drug, a catalogue, which, as you 
may observe in any Homoeopathic manual, contains various 
symptoms belonging to every organ of the body, what can 
be easier than to find alleged cures in every medical author 
which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic princi- 
ple; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called 
upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses ; and 
worst of all, if the monuments of the past are to be mutilated 
in favor of ^^ the sole law of Nature in therapeutics?" 

There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been 



48 

made as an entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine* 
They have been suffered to pass current so long that it is 
time they should be nailed to the counter, a little operation 
which I undertake with perfect cheerfulness to perform for 
them. 

The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic 
law, found in the precept given for the treatment of parts that 
have been frozen, by friction with snow or similar means. 
But we deceive ourselves by names, if we suppose the frozen 
part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. The snow 
may even be actually warmer than the part to which 
it is applied. But even if it were at the same tempe- 
rature when applied, it never did and never could do the least 
good to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulating the appli- 
cation of what ? of heat. But the heat must be applied grad- 
ually, just as food must be given a little at a time to those 
perishing with hunger. The patient is commonly brought 
into a warm room, where heat would be applied very 
rapidly, were not something interposed to prevent this, 
and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is ex- 
actly what is wanted ; it is not cold to the part ; it is very 
possibly warm on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and 
if it does not melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, 
the part will remain frozen up until dooms-day. — Now the 
treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in large or small quanti- 
ties is not Homoeopathy.. 

The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law 
is the alleged successful management of burns by holding 
them to the fire. This is a popular mode of treating those 
burns which are of too little consequence to require any 
more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of 
themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. 
It produces a most acute pain in the part, which is followed 
by some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye after ex- 
posure to strong light, and the ear after being subjected to 
very intense sounds. This is all it is capable of doing, and 
all farther notions of its efficacy must be attributed merely 
to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords any 
comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive 
him of it as it would be to convince the mistress of the 
smoke jack or the flat iron, that the fire does not literally 
** draw the fire out," which is her hypothesis. 

But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and 



49 

burns by heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of 
the great principle of Homoeopathy. For you will remem- 
ber that this principle is, that Like cures Like, and not that 
Same cures Same, that there is resemblance and not identity 
between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by 
the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to insist 
upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. 
For if Same cures Same, then every poison must be its own 
antidote ; which is neither a part of their theory, nor their 
so-called experience. They have been asked, often enough, 
why it was that arsenic could not cure the mischief that 
arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause of small- 
pox did not remedy the disease it had produced, and then 
they were ready enough to see the distinction I have pointed 
out. — Oh no ! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only 
of one very much like him I 

A third instance in proof of the homoeopathic law is sought 
for in the acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how 
does the law apply to this? It is granted by the advocates of 
Homoeopathy, that there is a resemblance between the effects 
of the vaccine virus on a person in health, and the symptoms 
of small pox. Therefore, according to the rule, the vaccine 
virus will cure the small pox, which as every body knows is 
entirely untrue. But it prevents small pox, say the Homoeo- 
pathists. Yes, and so does small pox prevent itself from ever 
happening again, and we know just as much of the principle 
involved in the one case as in the other. For this is only 
one of a series of facts which we are wholly unable to ex- 
plain. Small pox, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, 
protect those who have them once from future attacks ; but 
nettle rash, and catarrh, and lung fever, each of which is just 
as homoeopathic to itself as each of the others, have no such 
preservative power. We are obliged to accept the fact, unex- 
plained, and we can do no more for vaccination than for the 
rest. 

I come now to the most directly practical point connected 
with the subject, namely : 

What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the 
proper Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases ? 

As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been 
almost universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the 
question of their efficacy is thrown open, in common with that 
5 



i 



50 

of the truth of their fundamental axiom, as both are tested in 
practice. 

We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoe- 
opathy to three sources. 

1. The statements of the unprofessional public. 

2. The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners. 

3. The results of trials by competent and honest physicans, 
not pledged to the system. 

I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they 
are represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to 
attribute little value to all statements of wonderful cures, 
coming from those who have never been accustomed to watch 
the caprices of disease, and have not cooled down their young 
enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil observation. Those who 
know nothing of the natural progress of a malady, of its ordi- 
nary duration, of its various modes of terminating, of its lia- 
bility to accidental complications, of the signs which mark 
its insignificance or severity, of what is to be expected of it 
when left to itself, of how much or how little is to be an- 
ticipated from remedies, those who know nothing or next to 
nothing of all these things, and who are in a great state of 
excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new 
medical discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges 
of facts that have misled so many sagacious men, who have 
spent their lives in their daily study and observation. I be- 
lieve that, after having drawn the portrait of defunct Perkin- 
ism, with its five thousand printed cures, and its million and 
a half computed ones, its miracles blazoned about through 
America, Denmark, and England ; after relating, that forty 
years ago, women carried the Tractors about in their pockets, 
and workmen could not make them fast enough for the pub- 
lic demand ; and then showing you, as a curiosity, a single 
one of these instruments, an odd one of a pair, which I obtain- 
ed only by a lucky accident, so utterly lost is the memory of 
all their wonderful achievements ; I believe, after all this, I 
need not waste time in showing that medical accuracy is not 
to be looked for in the florid reports of benevolent associa- 
tions, the assertions of illustrious patrons, the lax effusions of 
daily journals, or the effervescent gossip of the tea table. 

Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the cham- 
pions of Homoeopathy, has said that *^ the new healing art is 
not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but 



51 

according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the 
incontrovertible nature of its innate principles." 

We have seen something of ^^ the incontrovertible nature of 
its innate principles," and it seems probable, on the whole, 
that its success in general, must be made up of its success in 
isolated cases. Some attempts have been made, however, to 
finish the whole matter by sweeping statistical documents, 
which are intended to prove its triumphant success over the 
common practice. 

It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to 
see the Homoeopathic Examiner, that this journal led off in 
its first number, with a grand display of every thing the newly 
imported doctrine had to show for itself It is well remark- 
ed, on the tiDcntij-third page of this article, that '^ the com- 
parison of bills of mortality among an equal number of sick, 
treated by divers methods, is a most poor and lame way to 
get at conclusions touching principles of the healing art.'^ 
In confirmation of which, the author proceeds, upon the 
tioenty-jiftli page, to prove the superiority of the Homoeopa- 
thic treatment of cholera, by precisely these very bills of mor- 
tality. Now, every intelligent physician is aware, that the 
poison of cholera differed so much in its activity at different 
times and places, that it was next to impossible to form any 
opinion as to the results of treatment, unless every precau- 
tion was taken to secure the most perfectly corresponding 
conditions in the patients treated, and hardly even then. Of 
course, then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of Mordvinow, 
backed by a number of so called physicians, practising in 
Russian villages, is singularly competent to the task of set- 
tling the whole question of the utility of this or that kind of 
treatment ; to prove that if not more than eight and a half 
per cent, of those attacked with the disease perished, the rest 
owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can remember when 
more than a hundred patients in a public institution, were 
attacked with what, I doubt not, many Homoeopathic physi- 
cians (to say nothing of Homoeopathic admirals J would have 
called cholera, and not one of them died, though treated in 
the common way, and it is my firm belief, that if such a re- 
sult had followed the administration of the omnipotent glo- 
bules, it would have been in the mouth of every adept in Eu- 
rope, from duin of London, to Spohr of Gandersheim. No 
longer ago than yesterday, in one of the most widely circula- 
ted papers of this city, there was published an assertion, that 



52 

the mortality in several Homoeopathic Hospitals, was not 
quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by the 
writer, Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hun^- 
dred. An honest man should be ashamed of such an argu-- 
mentum ad ignorantiam. The mortality of a hospital de- 
pends not merely on the treatment of the patients, but on the 
class of diseases it is in the habit af receiving,, on the place 
where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances. 
For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of 
Europe, that receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, 
and, on the other hand, there are others, where dangerous dis- 
eases are accumulated out of the common proportion.. Thus, in 
the wards of Louis, at the Hospital of La Pitie, a vast num- 
ber of patients in the last stages of consumption were con- 
stantly entering, to swell the mortality of that hospital. 
It was because he was known to pay particular attention to the 
diseases of the chest, that patients laboring under those fatal 
affections to an incurable extent, were so constantly coming 
in upon him. It is always a miserable appeal to the thought- 
lessness of the vulgar, to allege the naked fact of the less 
comparative mortality in the practice of one hospital, or of 
one physician than another, as an evidence of the superi- 
ority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must 
always be expected that those institutions and individuals en- 
joying, to the highest degree, the confidence of the commu- 
nity, will lose the largest proportion of their patients ; for the 
simple reason, that they will naturally be looked to by those 
suffering from the gravest class of diseases ; that many, who 
know that they are affected with mortal disease, will choose to 
die under their care or shelter, while the subjects of trifling mal- 
adies, and mere troublesome symptoms, amuse themselves to 
any extent among the fancy practitioners. When, therefore, 
Dr. Muhlenbein, as stated in the Homceopathic Examiner, 
and quoted in yesterday's Daily Advertiser, asserts that the 
mortality among his patients is only one per cent, since he 
has practised Homoeopathy, whereas it was six per cent, wheft 
he employed the common mode of practice, I am convinced 
by this, his own statement, that the citizens of Brunswick, 
whenever they are seriously sick, take good care not to send 
for Dr. Muhlenbein ! 

It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the 
compass of a single lecture, any detailed examination of the 
very numerous cases reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises 



63 

and Journals. Having been in the habit of receiving the 
French Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine, until the pre- 
mature decease of that Journal, I have had the opportunity 
of becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these 
documents, and experiencing whatever degree of conviction 
they were calculated to produce. Although of course I do 
not wish any value to be assumed for my opinion, such as it 
is, I consider that you are entitled to hear it. So far then, 
as I am acquainted with the general character of the cases 
reported by the Homoeopathic physicians, they would for the 
most part be considered as wholly undeserving a place in 
any English, French, or American periodical of high stand- 
ing, if instead of favoring the doctrine they were intended to 
support, they were brought forward to prove the efficacy of 
any common remedy administered by any common practi- 
tioner. There are occasional exceptions to this remark ; 
but the general truth of it is rendered probable by the fact 
that these cases are alw^ays, or almost always written with 
the single object of showing the efficacy of the medicine used, 
or the skill of the practitioner, and it is recognised as a gen- 
eral rule that such cases deserve very little confidence. Yet 
they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who 
are not fully aw^are of the fallacies of medical.! evidence. 
Let me state a case in illustration. Nobody doubts that 
some patients recover under every form of practice. Proba- 
bly all are willing to allow that a large majority, for instance, 
ninety in a hundred, of such cases as a physician is called to 
in daily practice, would recover, sooner or later, with more 
or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to interfere seri- 
ously with the effi)rts of nature. 

Suppose then a physician who has a hundred patients pre- 
scribes to each of them pills made of some entirely inert 
substance, as starch, for instance. — Ninety of them get well, 
or if he chooses to use such language, he cures ninety of 
them. It is evident according to the doctrine of chances, that 
there must be a considerable number of coincidences between 
the relief of the patient and the administration of the remedy. 
It is altogether probable that there will happen two or three 
very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in 
which it would seem evident that the medicine produced the 
relief, though it had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. 
Now suppose that the physician publishes these cases, will 
they not have a plausible appearance of proving that which, 
5* 



54 

as we granted at the outset, was entirely false ? Suppose that 
instead of pills of starch he employs microscopic sugar- 
plums, with the five million billion trillionth part of a suspi- 
eion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his success- 
ful cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living 
ones of his female acquaintances — does that make the impres- 
sion a less erroneous one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic 
works and journals and gossip one can never, or next to 
never, find any thing but successful cases, which might do 
very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not prove as 
much for the swindling advertisers whose certificates dis- 
grace so many of our newspapers. How long will it take 
mankind to learn that while they listen to '' the speaking hun- 
dreds and units, who make the world ring" with the pre- 
tended triumphs they have witnessed, the '' dumb millions " 
of deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of 
their misplaced confidence ! 

I am sorry to see also that a degree of ignorance as to the 
natural course of diseases is often shown in these published 
cases, which, although it may not be detected by the unpro- 
fessional reader, conveys an unpleasant impression to those 
who are acquainted with the subject. Thus a young woman 
affected \Nii\\ jaundice is mentioned in the German Annals of 
Clinical Homoeopathy, as having been cured in twenty-nine 
days by Pulsatilla and Nux Vomica. Rummel, a well known 
writer of the same school, speaks of curing a case of jaun- 
dice in thirty-four days by Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, 
aconite and cinchona. I happened to have a case in my 
own household, a ie\N weeks since, which lasted about ten 
days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in 
hospital practice, so that it was nothing to boast of 

Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a 
patient with sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under 
the common treatment. The patient gets well by the use of 
arnica, in a little more than a month longer, and this ex-* 
traordinary fact is published in the French Archives of 
Homoeopathic Medicine. 

In the same journal is recorded the case of a patient who 
with nothing more, as far as any proof goes, than influenza, 
gets down to her shop upon the sixth day. 

And again, the cool way in which every thing favorable 
in a case is set down by these people entirely to their treat- 
ment, may be seen in a case of croup reported in the Homce- 



55 

opathic Gazette of Leipsic, in which leeches^ blistering, 
inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal medicine had 
been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one 
drop of some homcBopathic fluid. 

I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the 
grounds of an opinion the time does not allow me to justify 
more at length; other such cases are lying open before me; 
there is no end to them if more were wanted ; for nothing is 
necessary but to look into any of the numerous broken down 
Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes of which may be found 
on the shelves of those curious in such matters. 

A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been 
made in different parts of the world. Six of these are men- 
tioned in the Manifesto of the Homoeopathic Examiner. — 
Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely silence people, 
would be to forget the whole experience of the past. Dr. 
Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the- 
five guinea tractors, although they proved that they could 
work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco 
pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as for homoe- 
opathic globules. — Many persons thought the results of these 
trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment ; 
those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and eva- 
sion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated 
by the Homoeopathic Examiner itself, look exceedingly like 
a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of 
that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of these 
public trials at all ; having abundant other evidence on the 
point. But I think it best on the whole to mention two of 
them in a few words ; that instituted at Naples, and that of 
Andral. 

There have been few names in the medical profession- 
for the last half century so widely known throughout the world 
of science as that of M. Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the 
treatment of insanity, and who was without a rival in that de- 
partment of practical medicine It is from an analysis com- 
municated by him to the Gazette Medicale de Paris, that I de- 
rive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples 
by Dr. Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This^ 
account seems to be entirely deserving of credit. Ten pa- 
tients were set apart and not allowed to take any medicine 
at all, — much against the wish of the Homoeopathic physi- 
cian. All of them got well, and of course all of them would 



56 

have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to 
the treatment. — Six other slight cases (each of which is speci- 
fied) got well under the homoeopathic treatment — none of its 
asserted specific effects being manifested. All the rest were 
cases of grave disease, and so far as the trial, which was 
interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew 
worse or received no benefit. A case is reported on the 
page before m§ of a soldier affected with acute inflammation 
in the chest, who took successively aconite, bryonia, nux 
vomica and pulsatilla, and after thirty-eight days of treat- 
ment remained without any important change in his disease. 
And the homoeopathic physician who treated these patients 
was M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been an- 
nouncing his wonderful cures. And M. Esquirol asserted 
to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that this M. de Hora- 
tiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the Exami- 
ner's Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently re- 
nounced Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this 
same periodical, which is so very easy in explaining away 
the results of these trials, makes a mistake of only six years 
or a little more as to the time when this at Naples was insti- 
tuted. 

M. Andral, the ^^ eminent and very enlightened allopa- 
thist" of the Homoeopathic Examiner, made the following 
statement in March 1835, to the Academy of Medicine. **I 
have submitted this doctrine to experiment ; I can reckon at 
this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and 
forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, 
under the eye of numerous witnesses ; to avoid every objection 
I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeo- 
pathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known ; 
the regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained 
from the sisters attached to the Hospital, a special regimen, 
such as Hahnemann orders. I was told however, some months 
since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the doc- 
trine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again ; I have 
studied the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had 
studied their books, and I became convinced that they treated 
their patients as I had treated mine, and I affirm that I have 
been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other person." 

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence 
of all the homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, 
so far as he could observe, the progress or terniination of 



I 



57 

diseases. — It deserves notice that he experimented with the 
most boasted substances — cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryo- 
nia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he adminis- 
tered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish 
symptoms, in which it exerts so much power, according to 
Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the slightest 
influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before. 

These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard 
to be explained aw^ay, but it is calmly said that he " did not 
know enough of the method to select the remedies with any 
tolerable precision."* Who are they that practice Homoeo- 
pathy, and say this of a man w^ith the Materia Medica of 
Hahnemann lying before him ? Who are they that send these 
same globules, on which he experimented, accompanied by a 
little book, into families, whose members are thought com- 
petent to employ them, when they deny any such capacity to 
a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients, 
the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in 
the world, the consulting physician of the King of France, 
and one of the most renowned practical writers, not merely 
of his nation, but of his age ? I leave the quibbles by which 
such persons would try to creep out from under the crushing 
w^eight of these conclusions, to the unfortunates who suppose 
that a i^eply is equivalent to an ansiver. 

Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of 
Paris, invited two Hom.oeopathic practitioners to experiment 
in his wards. One of these was Curie, now of London, whose 
works are on the counters of some of our bookstares, and 
probably in the hands of some of my audience. This gen- 
tleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened man, 
and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own med- 
icines from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann him- 
self, and eaiployed them for four or five months, upon pa- 
tients in his ward, and w^ith results equally unsatisfactory, as 
appears from Dr. Baillie's statement, at a meeting of the 
Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was per- 

* Homoeopathic Examiner, Vol. I. p. 22. 

*' Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician. (' In a word, instead 
of being dependent upon bUnd chance, that there is an infallible law, 
guided by which, the physician must select the proper remedies.')" 
Ibid, in a notice of Menzel's paper. 



58 

mltted by the Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Ly- 
ons, with the same complete failure. 

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, 
then take the statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young 
physician, who treated homceopathically more than fifty pa- 
tients, suffering from diseases which it was not dangerous to 
treat in this way, taking every kind of precaution as to 
regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state of 
the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans 
of the doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced 
by the medicines. And more than this, read nine of these 
cases, which he has published, as I have just done, and ob- 
serve the absolute nullity of aconite, belladonna and bryonia 
against the symptoms over which they are pretended to exert 
such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing influences. In 
the view of these statements, it is impossible not to realize 
the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted science, 
by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. 
Were every hospital physician of Europe and America to de- 
vote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, 
and were their results to be unanimous as to the total worth- 
lessness of the whole system in practice, this slippery delu- 
sion would slide through their fingers without the slightest 
discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed ev- 
ery joint in its tortuous and trailing body. 

3. I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic 
doctrine, as announced by Hahnemann, it would be neces- 
sary to show, in the third place, that remedies never cure dis- 
eases when they are not capable of producing similar symp- 
toms. The burden of this somewhat comprehensive demon- 
stration, lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it 
may be left to their mature reflections. 

It entered into my original plan, to treat of the doctrine 
relating to Psora, or itch — an almost insane conception, 
which I am glad to get rid of — for this is a subject one does 
not care to handle without gloves. I am saved this trouble, 
however, by finding that many of the disciples of Hahnemann, 
those disciples, the very gospel of whose faith stands upon his 
word, make very light of his authority on this point, al- 
though he himself says, *' it has cost me twelve years of study 



59 

and research, to trace out the source of this incredible num- 
ber of chronic affections, to discover this great truth, which 
remained concealed from all my predecessors and contempo- 
raries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find out, 
at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to com- 
bat this hydra in all its different forms." 

But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made 
by Wolff, of Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor 
of the Homoeopathic Examiner, ^' represent the opinions of a 
large majority of Homoeopathists in Europe." 

'' It cannot be unknow^n to any one at all familiar wdth Ho- 
moeopathic literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the 
large majority of chronic diseases to actual itch, has met with 
the greatest opposition from Homoeopathic physicians them- 
selves." And again, ^' if the Psoric theory has led to no proper 
schism, the reason is to be found in the fact that it is almost 
without any influence in practice." 

We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, ^' Surgeon to 
the Grand Duke of Baden," and a ^' distinguished" homoeopa- 
thist, actually asked Hahnemann for the proof thsit chronic 
diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never arise from any 
other cause than itch ; and that according to common report, 
the venerable sage w^as highly incensed (fort courrouce) 
with Dr. Hartmann, of Leipsic, another ^^distinguished" Ho- 
moeopathist, for maintaining that they certainly did arise from 
other causes. 

And Dr. Fielitz, in the Homoeopathic Gazette of Leipsic, 
after saying, in a good natured way, that Psora is the devil in 
medicine, and that physicians are divided on this point, into 
diabolists and exorcists, declares that, according to a remark 
of Hahnemann, the whole civilized world is affected with 
Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate of Hahne- 
mann, who may honor me with his presence, by not attack- 
ing a doctrine, on which some of the disciples of his creed 
would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their time 
and strength. I will not meddle wdth this excrescence, which, 
though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like 
the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed ; time is 
too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too 
heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and 
stubble. 

I will close the subject with a brief examination of some 



60 

of the statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more 
particularly in the brilliant Manifesto of the Examiner, be- 
fore referred to. And first, it is there stated under the head 
of ^^ Homoeopathic Literature," that ^' Seven Hundred vol- 
umes have been issued from the press developing the pecu- 
liarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a 
scientific character that savans know well how to respect," 
If my assertion were proper evidence in the case, I should 
declare that having seen a good many of these publications, 
from the year 1834, when I bought the work of the Rev. 
Thomas Everest,* to within a few weeks, when I received 
my last importation of Homoeopathic literature, I have found 
that all, with a very few exceptions, were stitched pamphlets 
varying from twenty or thirty pages to somewhat less than a 
hundred, and generally resembling each other as much as so 
many spellmg books. 

But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the 
testimony of Dr. Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the 
fifteenth page of the same Manifesto as one of the most dis- 
tinguished among the Homoeopathists of Europe. I trans- 
late the sentence literally from the Archives de la Medicine 
Homoeopathique. 

*' The literature of homoeopathy, if that honorable name 
must be applied to all kinds of book making, has been de- 
graded to the condition of the humblest servitude. Produc- 
tions without talent, without spirit, without discrimination, 
flat and pitiful eulogies, exaggerations surpassing the limits 
of the most robust faith, invectives against such as dared to 
doubt the dogmas which had been proclaimed, or catalogues 
of remedies ; of such materials is it composed ! From dis- 
tance to distance only, have appeared some memoirs useful 
to science or practice, which appear as so many green 
oases in the midst of this literary desert." 

It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, 
what has been the success of Homoeopathy in the different 
countries of Europe, and what is its present condition. 

The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is 
of course on Germany. We know very little of its medical 
schools, its medical doctrines or its medical men, compared 
with those of England and France. And, therefore, when 

* Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as having been published 
in 1835. 



61 

an intelligent traveller gives a direct account from personal 
inspection, of the miserable condition of the Homoeopathic 
hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe, and the 
first on the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy 
enough to answer or elude the fact by citing various hard 
names of '^ distinguished " practitioners, which sound just 
as well to the uninformed public as if they were Meckel, or 
Tiedemann, or Langenbeck. Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be 
sure, is opposed to Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and 
ought to know something of his own countrymen, assures us 
that '' Dr. Kopp is the only German Homceopathist, if we 
can call him so, who has been distinguished as an author 
and practitioner before he examined this miethod." And 
Dr. Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph 
relating to the Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same 
thing. And I will cheerfully expose myself to any imperti- 
nent remark which it might suggest, to assure my audience 
that I never heard or saw one authentic Homoeopathic name 
of any country in Europe, which 1 had ever heard mentioned 
before, as connected with medical science by a single word or 
deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to my ears, 
unless Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist that discovered 
a little body in the cavity of the head, called the otic ganglion. 
But you need ask no better proof of who and v/hat the Ger- 
man adherents of this doctrine must be, than the testimony 
of a German Homoeopathist, of the wretched character of 
the works they manufacture to enforce its claims. 

As for the act of this or that government tolerating or 
encouraging Homoeopathy, every person of common intelli- 
gence knows that it is a mere form granted or denied accord- 
ing to the general principles of policy adopted in different 
states, or the degree of influence which some few persons 
wdio have adopted it may happen to have at court. What 
may be the value of certain pompous titles with which many 
of the advocates of Homoeopathy are honored, it might be 
disrespectful to question. But in the mean time, the judi- 
cious inquirer may ponder over an extract, which I translate 
from a paper relating to a personage well known to the 
community as Williams the Oculist, with whom I had the 
honor of crossing the Atlantic some years since, and who 
himself handed me two copies of the paper in question. 

'^ To say that he was oculist of Louis XVHL and of 
Charles X., and that he now enjoys the same title with respect 
6 



62 

to His Majesty, Louis Philippe, and the King of the Belgians^ 
is unquestionably to say a great deal ; and yet it is one of 
the least of his titles to public confidence. His reputation 
rests upon a basis more substantial even than the numerous 
diplomas with which he is provided, than the membership of 
the different medical societies which have chosen him as 
their associate," etc. etc. 

And as to one more point, it is time that the public should 
fully understand that the common method of supporting 
barefaced imposture at the present day, both in Europe and 
in this country, consists in trumping up '^Dispensaries,'' 
'' Colleges of Health," and other advertising charitable clap- 
traps, which use the poor as decoy ducks for the rich, and 
the proprietors of which have a strong predilection for 
the title of *' Professor." These names, therefore, have 
come to be of little or no value as evidence of the good 
character, still less of the high pretensions of those who 
invoke their authority. Nor does it follow even when a 
chair is founded in connexion with a well known institution, 
that it has either a salary or an occupant; so that it may be, 
and probably is, a mere harmless piece of toleration on the 
part of the government if a Professorship of Homceopathy 
is really in existence at Jena or Heidelberg. And finally, 
in order to correct the error of any who might suppose that 
the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long since 
fallen into the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two 
lines which a celebrated anatomist and surgeon, (whose 
name will occur again in this lecture in connection with a 
very pleasing letter,) addressed to the French Academy of 
Medicine in 1835. '*! happened to be in Germany some 
months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; 
one of them wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; 
they would not even listen to him." This may have been 
very impolite and bigoted, but that is not precisely the point 
in reference to which I mention the circumstance. 

But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easi- 
ly obtain exact information from France and England. I 
took the trouble to write some months ago to two friends in 
Paris in whom I could place confidence, for information 
upon the subject. One of them answered briefly to the eflfect 
that nothing was said about it. When the late Curator of 
the Lowell Institute, at his request, asked about the works 
upon the subject, he was told that they had remained a long 
time on the shelves quite unsaleable, and never spoken of 



63 

The other gentleman, whose name is well known to my 
audience, and who needs no commendation of mine, had the 
kindness to procure for me many publications upon the sub- 
ject, and some information which sets the whole matter at 
rest, so far as Paris is concerned. He went directly to the 
Baillieres, the principal and almost the only publishers of all 
the Homoeopathic books and journals in that city. The fol- 
lowing facts were taken by my correspondent from the ac- 
count books of this publishing firm. Four HoracEopathic 
Journals have been published in Paris ; three of them by the 
Baillieres. 

The reception they met with may be judged of by the fol- 
lowing list, showing the number of subscribers to each on 
the books of the publishing firm in Paris during several 
successive years. 

Year. Subscribers. 

1. Bihliotheque Homodopathique, . . . 1833 129 

1835 80 

1837 72 
1839 55 
1841 31 

2. Archives de la Medicine Homoeo- 

pathique, 1834 186 

1836 175 

1838 148 

Changed its name to Journal de la Doc- 
trine Hahnemanienne, in 1840 114 

Ceased to be published. 

3. Revue Critique et Retrospective de la 

Matiere Medicale, 1840 65 

1841 51 

4. A Review published by some other house, which lasted 
one year and had about 50 subscribers, appeared in 1834-5. 

These are the only four Journals of HomcEopathy ever 
published in Paris. They informed my correspondent that 
the sale of homoeopathic books was much less than formerly, 
and that consequently they should undertake to publish no 
new books upon the subject except those of Jahr or Hahne- 
mann. *' This man," says my correspondent, — referring to 



64 

one of the brothers — "the publisher and head-quarters of 
HomcBopathy in Paris, informs me that it is going down in 
England and Germany as well as in Paris. For ail the facts 
he had stated he pledged himself as responsible. 

Homceopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 
and '37, and since then has been going down. 

Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction 
in Paris had embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declin- 
ing. If you ask who Louis is, I refer you to the well known 
Homoeopathist, Peschier of Gene\^a, who says, addressing him, 
^^ I respect no one more than yourself; the feeling which 
guides your researches, your labors, and your pen, is so hon- 
orable and rare, that I could not but bow down before it ; 
and I own, if there were any allopathist who inspired me with 
higher veneration, it would be him and not yourself whom I 
should address.'' 

Among the names of *^ Distinguished Homoeopathists," 
however, displayed in imposing columns, in the index of the 
Homoeopathic Examiner, are those of Marjolin, Amussat, 
and Breschet, names well known to the world of science, 
and the last of them identified with some of the most valuable 
contributions which anatomical knowledore has received since 
the commencement of the present century. One Dr. Crose- 
rio,^ who stands sponsor for mdiiiy facts in that journal, makes 
the following statement among the rest; "Professors, who 
are esteemed among the most distinguished of the Faculty, 
(Faculte de 1' Ecole de Medicine,) both as to knowledge and 
reputation, have openly confessed the power of Homoeopathia 
in forms of disease where the ordinary method of practice 
proved totally insufficient. It affords me the highest pleas- 
ure to select from among these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amus- 
sat and Breschet" — 

Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in 
my possession, from one of these Homceopathists to my corres- 
pondent. 

" Dear Sir, and respected professional brother, 

You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that 
a new American Journal, the New World^f has made use of 

* This gentleman's distinction is vouched for by Dr. F. Hartmann of 
Leipsic. Dr. Hartmann's distinction is certified by the editor of the Ho- 
moeopathic Examiner. 

\ I first saw M. Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal. 



65 

my name in support of the pretended Homoeopathic doc- 
trines, and that I am represented as one of the warmest par- 
tisans of Homoeopathy in France. 

I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for 
me upon the new continent, but I am obliged, in deference 
to truth, to reject it with my whole energy, I spurn far from 
me, every thing which relates to that charlatanism called Ho- 
moeopathy, for these pretended doctrines cannot endure the 
scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons, who are guided by 
honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest of arts. 
I am, etc. etc. G. Breschet, 

Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, 
Member of the Institute, Surgeon of 
Hotel Dieu, and consultinor Surgeon 
of the King, etc, 
Paris, 3d November, 1841. 

Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he 
was informed by Madame Hahnemann, who converses in 
French more readily than her husband, and therefore often 
speaks for him, that '^ he was not a physician, neither Homoe- 
opathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the surgeon of their 
own establishment, that is, performed as a surgeon all the 
operations they had occasion for in their practice.'' 

I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, 
I doubt not, would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it re- 
sounded like the Grecian horse, at hearing such a doctrine 
associated with his respectable name. I was not aware, when 
writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor, whose lectures I 
long attended, was included in these audacious claims; but 
after the specimens I have given of the accuracy of the for- 
eign correspondence of the Homoeopathic Examiner, any fur- 
ther information I might obtain, would seem so superfluous 
as hardly to be worth the postage. 

Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently mis- 
erable condition in Paris. Yet, there lives, and there has 
lived for years, the illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who him^- 
self assured my correspondent that no place offered the ad- 
vantages of Paris in its investigation, by reason of the atten- 
tion there paid to it. 

In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in 
October, 1839, about eight years after its introduction into 
the country, that there were eighteen Homoeopathic physi- 
6* 



66 

cians in the United Kingdom, of whom only three were to be 
found out of London, and . that many of these practised 
Homoeopathy in secret. 

It will be seen, therefore, that according to the recent state- 
ment of one of its leading English advocates. Homoeopathy 
had obtained not quite half as many practical disciples in Eng- 
land, as Perkinism could show for itself in a som.ewhat less 
period from the time of its first promulgation in that country. 

Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says 
there is '^ one in Dublin, Dr. Luther ; at Glasgow Dr. Scott.'/ 
The '^ distinguished'' Croserio writes from Paris, dating Oc- 
tober 20, 1839, '' On the other hand. Homoeopathy is com- 
mencing to make an inroad into England by the way of Ire- 
land. At Dublin, distinguished physicians have already em- 
braced the new system, and a great part of the nobility and 
gentry of that city have emancipated themselves from the 
English fashion and professional authority." 

But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bul- 
wer patronise Homoeopathy ; the dueen Dow^ager Adelaide 
has been treated by a Homoeopathic physician. ^' Jarley is 
the delight of the nobility and gentry." *' The Royal Fam- 
ily are the patrons of Jarley." 

Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two 
Lords, and if the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty 
itself, all of which illustrious dignities were claimed in be- 
half of Benjamin Douglass Perkins? 

But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this 
case, another instance can be given in which the evidence of 
British noblemen and their ladies is shown to be as valuable 
in establishing the character of a medical man or doctrine, 
as would be the testimony of the Marquis of Waterford con- 
cerning the present condition and prospects of Missionary 
enterprise. I have before me an octavo volume of more than 
four hundred pages, in which, among much similar matter, I 
find highly commendatory letters from the Marchioness of 
Ormond, Lady Harriot Kavanagh, the Countess of Bucking- 
hamshire, the Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P., and the 
Most Noble, the Marquis of Sligo, — all addressed to '' John 
St. John Long, Esq." a wretched charlatan, twice tried for, 
and once convicted of manslaughter at the Old Bailey. 

This poor creature too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the 
Medical Profession as a great confederation of bigoted mo- 
nopolists. He too says, that ^' If an innovator should appear, 



67 

holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders 
which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, 
and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impos- 
tor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Har- 
vey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery 
of Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who 
was visited with the punishment of other heretics by the ec- 
clesiastical authorities of a catholic country some centuries 
since, there is no very direct inference to be drawn to the 
medical profession of the present time. His name should 
be babbled no longer, after having been placarded for the 
hundredth time in the pages of St. John Long. But if we 
are doomed to see constant reference to the names of Harvey 
and Jenner in every worthless pamphlet containing the pros- 
pectus of some new trick upon the public, let us, once for all, 
stare the facts in the face, and see how the discoveries of 
these great men were actually received by the medical pro- 
fession. 

In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circu- 
lation. His doctrines were a complete revolution of the pre- 
vailing opinions of all antiquity. They immediately found 
both champions and opponents; of which last, one only, Ri- 
olanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an answer, on account 
of his ^'rank, fame, and learning." Controversy in science, 
as in religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all the 
courtesy which our present habits demand, and it is possible 
that some hard words may have been applied to Harvey, as it 
is very certain that he used the most contemptuous express- 
ions towards others. 

Harvey declares, in his second letter to Riolanus, ^' since 
the first discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a mo- 
ment has passed, without my hearing it both well and ill spo- 
ken of; some attack it with great hostility, others defend it 
with high encomiums ; one party believe that I have abun- 
dantly proved the truth of the doctrine against all the weight 
of opposing arguments, by experiments, observations and dis- 
sections ; others think it not yet sufficiently cleared up, and 
free from objections." Two really eminent Professors, Plem- 
pius of Louvain, and Walaeus of Leyden, were among its 
early advocates. 

The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and 
the names of Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradu- 
ally, but certainly, before the demonstrations of Harvey. 



68 

Twenty-four years after the publication of his first work, 
and six years before his death, his bust in marble was placed 
in the Hall of the College of Physicians, with a suitable in- 
scription recording his discoveries. 

Two years after this, he was unanimously invited to ac- 
cept the Presidency of that body ; and he lived to see his doc- 
trine established, and all reputable opposition withdrawn. 

There were many circumstances connected with the dis- 
covery of Dr. Jenner which were of a nature to excite repug- 
nance and opposition. The practice of inoculation for the 
small-pox had already disarmed that disease of many of its 
terrors. The introduction of a contagious disease from a 
brute creature into the human system, naturally struck the 
public mind with a sensation of disgust and apprehension, 
and a part of the medical public may have shared these feel- 
ings. I find that Jenner's discovery of vaccination w^as made 
public in June^ 1798. In July of the same year, the cele- 
brated surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus re- 
ceived from Dr. Jenner, and in communicating the success of 
this experiment, he mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the 
Small Pox Hospital, and himself, are convinced of the effi- 
cacy of the cow-pox. In November of the same year, Dr. 
Pearson published his '^ Inquiry/' containing the testimony 
of numerous practitioners in different parts of the kingdom^, 
to the efficacy of the practice. Dr. Haygarth, who was so 
conspicuous in exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among 
the very earliest to express his opinion in favor of vaccina- 
tion. In 1801, Dr. Lettsom mentions the circumstance *' as 
being to the honor of the medical professors, that they have 
very generally encouraged this salutary practice, although it 
is certainly calculated to lessen their pecuniary advantages 
by its tendency to extirpate a fertile source of professional 
practice." 

In the same year, the Medical Committee of Paris spoke 
of vaccination in a public letter, as *^ the most brilliant and 
most important discovery of the eighteenth century." The 
Directors of a Society for the Extermination of the Small 
Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807, '' congratulate 
the public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal 
College of Physicians of London, after a most minute and 
laborious investigation made by the command of his majesty, 
have a second time expressed on the subject of vaccination, 
in their Report laid before the House of Commons, in the 



«tej 



69 

last session of Parliament ; in consequence of which the sum 
of twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as a 
remuneration for his discovery, in addition to ten thousand 
pounds before granted." (In June 1802.) 

These and similar accusations, so often brought up against 
the Medical Profession, are only one mode in which is man- 
ifested a spirit of opposition not merely to medical science, 
but to all science, and to all sound knowledge. It is a spirit 
which neither understands itself nor the object at which it is 
aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the past, and 
the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or 
falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the 
persons who have passed their lives in the study of a branch 
of knowledge the very essence of which must always consist 
in long and accurate observation, are less competent to judge 
of new^ doctrines in their own department than the rest of the 
community. It belongs to the clown in society, the destruc- 
tive in politics, and the rogue in practice. 

The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legit- 
imate result of his severe training and patient study, should 
be mentioned only to check the pretensions of presumptuous 
ignorance. The example of Jenner, who gave his inestima- 
ble secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment and 
researches, unpurchased to the public, — when, as was said 
in Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand 
pounds by it as well as any smaller sum, — should be referred 
to only to rebuke the selfish venders of secret remedies, 
among whom his early history obliges us reluctantly to 
record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the 
great body of physicians as if they were united in a league 
to support the superannuated notions of the past against 
the progress of improvement, have read the history of medi- 
cine to little purpose. The prevalent failing of this pro- 
fession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too credulous ear 
to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present time 
ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine 
professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it 
has not succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, 
learned, and ingenious advocates for its claims, the fault 
must be in the doctrine and not in the medical profession. 

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial 
than this, and we have seen with what results. It only re- 
mains to throw out a few conjectures as to the particular 
manner in which it is to break up and disappear. 



70 

1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion 
will never survive the loss of friends who may die of any 
acute disease, under a treatment such as that prescribed by 
Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far cases of this kind will 
be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it acquires 
any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with 
them the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly 
valued life be thus sacrificed. 

2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capri- 
cious individuals who constitute the most prominent class of 
its patrons, will return to visible doses, were it only for the 
sake of a change. 

3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually 
withdraw from the rotten half of his business and try to 
make the public forget his connection with it. 

4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to 
rejoin the medical profession ; or he will embrace some 
newer and if possible equally extravagant doctrine ; or he 
will stick to his colors and go down with his sinking doc- 
trine. Very few will pursue the course last mentioned, 

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction 
there will probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms 
of HomcEopathy. On the 13th page of the too frequently 
cited Manifesto of the Examiner, I read the following stately 
paragraph. 

'' Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, 
whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe, has been 
an acknowledged advocate of Hahnemann's doctrines for 
several years. He abandoned Allopathia for Homoeopathia." 
The date of this statement is January 1840. I find on look- 
ing at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel or Bigelius, 
to speak more classically, has been at various times publish- 
ing HomcEopathic books for some years. 

Again, on looking into the Encyclographie des Sciences 
Medicales for April 1840, I find a work entitled *^ Manual of 
Hydrosudopathy, or the treatment of diseases by cold water, 
etc. etc. by Dr. Bigel, physician of the School of Strasburg, 
Member of the Medico-chirurgical Institute of Naples, of the 
Academy of St. Petersburg — assessor of the college of the em- 
pire of Russia, physician of his late Imperial Highness the 
Grand Duke Constantine, chevalier of the Legion of Honor, 
etc." Hydrosudopathy or Hydropathy, as it is sometimes 
called, is a new medical doctrine or practice which has sprung 



^ 



71 

up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it bids fair to drive 
out of the market, if, as Dr. Bige] says, fourteen physicians 
afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their 
colleagues came to Graefenberg, in the year 1886 alone, and 
were cured. Now Dr. Bigel, '* whose elevated reputation is 
well known in Europe," writes as follows : ^* The reader 
will not fail to see in this defence of the curative method of 
Graefenberg, a profession of medical faith, and he will be 
correct in so doing." And his work closes with the follow- 
ing sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual ; ^' We 
believe with religion that the water of baptism purifies the 
soul from its original sin ; let us believe also, with experi- 
ence, that it is for our corporeal sins the redeemer of the 
human body." — If Bigel, physician to the late Grand Duke 
Constantine, is identical with Bigel, whom the Examiner 
calls physician to the Emperor of Russia, it appears that he 
is now actively engaged in throwing cold water at once upon 
his patients and the future prospects of Homoeopathy. 

If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doc- 
trines is received with tolerable unanimity among his dis- 
ciples, except the central axiom, Similia similihus cur an- 
tur ; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its support 
upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we 
think of those who announce themselves ready to relinquish 
all the accumulated treasures of our art, to trifle with life 
upon the strength of these fantastic theories ? What shall 
we think of professed practitioners of medicine, if, in the 
words of Jahr, ^^ from ignorance, for their personal conven- 
ience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one 
day Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically ;" if they 
parade their pretended new science before the unguarded 
portion of the community ; if they suffer their names to be 
coupled with it wherever it may gain a credulous patient ; 
and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse all argu- 
ment for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance 
and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy 
tissue, when they are questioned by those competent to judge 
and entitled to an answer? 



72 Xf 

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which 
you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dear- 
est to you. A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel 
erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresenta- 
tion, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the au- 
thority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition. 
Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the 
public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, 
some are weak enough to suppose it can escape the inevita- 
ble doom of utter disgrace and oblivion. Not many years 
can pass away before the same curiosity excited by one of 
Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of 
the Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer ex- 
istence it can only be by falling into the hands of the sordid 
wretches who wring their bread from the cold grasp of dis- 
ease and death in the hovels of ignorant poverty. 

As one humble member of a profession that for more than 
two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the 
best earthly interests of mankind, always assailed and in- 
sulted from without by such as are ignorant of its infinite 
perplexities and labors, always striving in unequal contest 
with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday, 
and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not mere- 
ly for itself and the present moment, but for the race and 
the future, I have lifted my voice against this lifeless delu- 
sion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble 
science it is too weak to strike, or to injure. 



r 



